Weakly presented? Who cares? The opportunity arose to do something the free peoples of the world should be doing routinely every week: extirpate a dictator and replace his dictatorship with a real democracy, the most legitimate sort of government.

Is not nearly all of the world's misery generated by the oppressions of totalitarian governments, unresponsive to their subject peoples' real needs? And do not totalitarian regimes always oppress? That's practically what they exist to do, window-dressing and rationalizations aside.

Therefore I pose this question: when the last dictator is strangled on the eviscerated guts of the last national chief of secret police, how much of the world's miseries will have fled?

I only think the resulting happy condition of worldwide democracy will last for but a generation or two, but this is at least enough time to get a good momentum on.

And at no point did I ever say any such thing. Iraq is not a separate war; it is a seamless part of the overall War On Terror; it is a campaign in it. Terrorists, whose longterm, sustaining motivation is their noxious religious bigotry, undertook over twenty years of bombings and attacks to start a war with us, from the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983 on. With 9/11, we Americans came to a full understanding of this. Those fanatics and bigots have sown the wind; let them reap the whirlwind until WE are satisfied they can't and won't do it any more. For generations we've been the longsuffering target of every damned idiot with a bomb and a grudge. Let's make sure we send the damned idiots to Gehenna, wholesale and on a regular basis. Let severed terrorist testicles be washed into storm drains in a stream of their supporters' hearts' blood. Those guys want to try terror? Fine. Bury them with pork sausage stuffed into their mouths.

Get the impression I don't like those guys? Remember that you don't see effective, sustained international terrorism without national sponsorship. The terrs may be hard to locate and hit, but their national sponsors can be found out and uprooted.

A good world is a world full of vigorous democracies who like hunting totalitarians and totalitarians' lackeys.

News flash: Your war is strengthening those who hate liberty. Your generation or two of happy happy w/w democracy is a complete utopian fantasy. Put down the Kool-Aide man, its unbecoming.

Perhaps when you learn to spell it ten tries out of ten, Griff. My contention stands; I believe more strongly in democracy and human freedom than you do.

Therefore, how are you, Griff, distinguishable from a fascistic slacker??

After all, I've not met a smart totalitarian-lover yet. I've met some warped ones, but none I'd call smart.

You know, for a guy I've got a lot of fundamental things in common with, you sure do a fine job of pissing me off regularly.

Wow! If they ever come up with Anglo-Jihad, you are so in as the leader. As for the national sponsors, many of them are still our allies, or at least our business partners. As far as I know, two countries we seem to have a real hardon for, Cuba and now Venezuela, don't seem to have been caught with ties to terrorists. However, being communists and socialists, they are the opposition, so if it was a choice between attacking them and Saudi Arabia, which has produced most of the terrorists, you can guess what the current adminstration would choose.

My bad. Sorry to have accused you of deeper understanding of the complex reality.

I don't support GW and I prefer liberty to material comfort.

I'd say it is because I'm helping you see basic flaws in your belief system. You cannot force other people to be free and growing our government's power over the individual does not make us more free. I'm glad I could help. :)

We may even be civil to one another if this war ever ends

Am I to understand you believe Bush to be a fascist? I've studied fascism, and nothing Bush does can honestly be mistaken for fascism. The people who claim the Bush Administration is fascistically or otherwise attacking civil liberties are people who are first and last anti-Bush, and not visibly pro anything. These are only civil libertarians at those times it looks good -- a most unreasonably distant second in their scheme of priorities. A great many of these people are toetag Democrats, making a religion out of their political affiliations. This is a very grave error, as the example of the Communists, who did the same thing, shows us. The Dems get no support from me until they quit fucking up like this. Upwards of fifteen years and counting, now...

There was a recent President who clearly leaned toward fascistic measures, as evinced by the kind of law his Administration made and the actions it took, viz., the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1994, the Communications Decency Act, the suborning of the entire Department of Justice into making its top priority running interference for the Clintons, and the browbeating of Smith & Wesson into signing off on a disadvantageous agreement on firearms manufacture, fortunately now moot. His name is William Jefferson Clinton, Democrat, and I am pleased to report I always voted against him. He was, however, annoyingly good at fooling enough of the electorate to stay in office.

It amazes me just how many people cannot believe I understand this point! Will you all kindly take it as read that I do? I grow impatient with your seemingly deliberate noncomprehension. For what seems like the sixth time, addressed to those who for their own stupid reasons will not listen, where the use of force comes in is in the removal of the obstacle to democracy's development presented by the forces of totalitarianism, all the way from the top man-on-horseback to the most junior lackey's lackey. The removal of the slavemakers and their antidemocracy program is all I expect the use of force to do. I can make it no plainer.

Have Iraq's slavemakers, in their campaign to return to their previous position of power and privilege, actually dented Iraqis' commitment to having a democracy, for all their car bombings, for all their dicked and dickless suiciders? I think the Iraqis are more committed to getting their democracy than Griff is. Good thing!

Then, in the absence of the slaveminded slavemakers' threat, you have a free field to bring up democracy. Humans are capable of self-governance, whether or not they've been recently in the habit. This, Griff, is a point you never seem to understand -- or else don't have any faith in, as the pessimistic tone of your comments indicates. Given this lacuna in your philosophy, how is it you call yourself a libertarian? Libertarianism is all about self-governance, is it not? Is this somehow only the exclusive property of American citizens? I don't see it that way.

Neither does PNAC, come to that: their whole thrust is that a world with markedly fewer autarchies, dictatorships, and despotic oligarchies and many more representative governments would be a world much more secure, and having much more in the way of mutual, common interests with mature republics like the United States. Given that, the next question is how do we get from a world full of autarchies et cetera to that goal? And if there's anything not to like in that goal, I haven't seen it. The ones who squawk about it all seem at bottom to be leftists of the most totalitarian stripe. Well, any idiot can complain, and most of them do. The action cannot make them any smarter.

I am satisfied of two things: that GWB's instinct is libertarian, and that Clinton's instinct is statist and socialist. Clinton did a good deal more growing of power than GWB has ever done. I can clearly see that the civil-wrongs portions of the USA PATRIOT Act are being rolled back under court challenges, legislative amendments, and such. Slowly, to be sure, but this is to be encouraged. Keep your legislators doing this -- they're supposed to be your representative and your senators, right? What will be left in the end will be more efficient coordination of American intelligence agencies, and expansion of what the intel community calls "consumers" -- of their product and analysis. The disconnects exposed by the 9/11 Commission's work are being rethought, in view of the government's basic mandate to protect the citizens and nation.

A consummation devoutly to be wish'd. We can always start practicing up.

Shame on you, Warch. That's a very big mistake. ;)

Iraq didnt launch a war against America. Al Quada launched a war against America. Al Qauda and Iraq had nothing to do with each other. America and it's allies launched attacks against Iraq.........whetgher or not those attacks were justified ( I personally believe they weren't) is not the point, the fact remains that Iraq made no attacks against America.

"anarchists just kill me.. "i hate government, but i don't want to give up all the benefits of organized society because i love my digital camera"

Anarchists come in all shapes and sizes but true anarchy is a tad more complex than "hating government".

Happy Monkey, thanks for your wonderful reportage, it made for excellent lunch time reading at work ::)

De nada.

Dana, the medical treatment of Ayman al-Zarqawi in an Iraqi governmental hospital for a serious leg wound lets the air out of your contention that "Al-Qaeda and Iraq had nothing to do with each other." Those whose guidance, if followed, would lose us the war, contend that bin Laden's religiosity and Saddam's overall secularism would have kept these two peachy fellows well apart -- I don't see that that idea holds up, so on this fundamental point, I ignore these people. The idea fails because both parties were working on establishing a partnership, and this is documented also. The idea fails because an alliance between these suits too well the dictatorships' need for proxy warriors and dictatorship's penchant for making war, either overtly or deniably; from the dictators' points of view, what's not to like? Go and look for the documentation. I'm finding it. Do some reading; there's quite a bit coming out nowadays.

International terrorism doesn't happen without national sponsors, official or unofficial, and the Saddam regime's active governmental and financial support of terrorism is so satisfactorily proven that I see no reason to doubt it. This war is not being solely prosecuted by al-Qaeda, either, nor is it solely directed against us; these guys, al-Quaeda and not-exactly, are working on revenging themselves on most of Europe. We should, I think, have suitable misgivings about their aims. I do not propose to endure the tyranny of the vengeance-minded; for their sin of attempting it, I should kill them.

DanaC, I grow very tired of repeating this, but how much did Nazi Germany have to do with Pearl Harbor? Nonetheless, we knew even without Germany's declaration of war that Germany was part of the overarching problem we'd have to solve. Saddam's Iraq had spent the eleven years between Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom exacerbating the problem, shooting at patrol planes, paying terrorists' families, and convincing the entire planet, you included, that they had WMD and the desire to use them, particularly in light of the chemical raids in the eighties. This is all part of the typical nasty behavior of dictatorships. Dictatorships and dictators are more alike than different -- Saddam and Adolf even shared a penchant for uniforms and facial hair -- and dictatorships have a great penchant for warfare. The foreign policy of dictatorships is usually one of conquest and generally being a bad neighbor. When we tangled with Hitler, his power relative to ours was considerably greater -- yet how much woe would have been averted if Hitler had been stopped in the Sudetenland or Alsace-Lorraine, when he was less powerful? We managed to have the wisdom to hit Saddam at the right time -- relatively early in his ongoing bad-neighbor policy. It was our good fortune that Saddam's regime wasn't as militarily competent as Hitler's. It had more capable weapons.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. We do not live under any great expectation of a followup attack on US soil precisely because of the Bush Administration's strategy of taking the war to our self-made, self-declared enemies' back yard and decimating them there. We are teaching the nations that their national interests do not lie with cells of thuggish religious bigots -- for it is their bigotry that provides our foes their emotional sustenance. We must discredit bigotry and crush it. The way to discourage others who might be sitting on the fence from taking bigotry up is to show them that bigots have short and unhappy lives and leave no children and get buried in small caskets because there are pieces missing.

This is why I have no patience with the antiwar demonstrators. Imprudence in this cost us our will to keep South Vietnam out of the darkness of a remarkably stupid and oppressive ideology, that like most such, proved efficient only at killing and wasting. Vietnam wasn't the only domino that fell. Why should anyone with a functioning central nervous system call for the victory of the tyrannical over the democratic? Why? Why? Why? Is not democracy already hard enough won? (For why this has been, read The First Democracies.)

I notice, for a specific instance, that the bulk of Iraqis aren't in sympathy with the antiwar marchers, either. No matter how many car and suicide bombs the would-be-again tyrants send against Iraqis, their march towards a democratized and likely federal governmental form is undeterred. It strikes me that the antiwar marchers are cowards and slackers, with no faith in the goodness of democracy, and no interest in seeing anyone outside of our borders get any. Shame! This is a moral failure, this allowing of oppression, tyranny, and bad government.

Apart from active support (arms, money) for:
Idi Amin
Hugo Banzer
Roberto Suazo Cordova
Ferdinand Marcos
Augusto Pinochet
Saddam Hussien
Suharto
Jorge Videla
Mohammed Ul-Haq (an earlier pakistani dictator propped up because Pakistan was a front for another pointless war on a concept - drugs)
Mobutu Seko
Hassan II
The House of Saud
Ngo Dinh Diem (classic example of cure worse than disease)
The Sultan of Brunei

That's just off the top of my head with checks for spelling. America is no fascist state, hyperbole aside but it helps and has helped keep much of the world under the thumb of some of the nastiest pieces of work around.

Those Iraqis you speak of marching towards democratic government - is that the South, controlled politically by the SCIRI - Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (since the people voted for it) and linked to the Badr Brigade and Sadr's lot or the north (excluding Kurdistan, lets call a fork a fork) which is under the control of Sunni militants?

You should study fascism more closely, looking more at Mussolini less at Hitler.
Any libertarian instinct Bush may have had has been thoroughly corrupted by his Neo-Conservative associates. The Homeland Security nonsense shows faith in the State not faith in the individual, a good indicator of fascistic not libertarian thinking. He is apparently bi-polar, thinking the state bureaucrats can do everything to keep us safe from enemies real and imagined and thinking state bureaucrats can't do anything at all in other areas.

The appalling nationalism Bush came into power wrapped in and has exploited to fight his war is a good indicator of a fascistic heart not a libertarian one.

The combination of state and business disguised as privatization but actually state supported monopoly shows a mind sickened by State power not one enlivened by a dedication to a free market.

A true fascist, maybe not. A true libertarian, absolutely not.

And the fact that the 9-11 terrorists took pilot training in the US with the knowledge of the CIA lets the air out of the contention that "Al-Qaeda and the US had nothing to do with each other."

No. Neither fact lets the air out of either contention.