Right now we are doing a splendid job in Iraq of conflating the idea of democracy and the experience of occupation by a foreign power. If they choose democracy, it will be in spite of the US, and we may not be happy with the leadership they choose. Will we, then, go back in and overthrow their elected government because we don't like it, the way we did in Iran when we installed the Shah? This is the history the US, and before that, of the British, in this region, though the British had centuries of diplomatic experience to help them be more smooth about it. Don't think the Iraqis, a literate people even if their alphabet looks like squiggles to us, have lost sight of that history.

I, for my part, am continually surprised that the people in the US who will scream the most to defend the Right to Life of a bunch of undifferentiated human cells have trouble recognizing that the basic Right to Life of real, actual, conscious people with working brains in Iraq has been violated. They're dead. This is about as clear a violation of the Right to Life as I have ever seen.

How many times do I have to say that I didn't support Saddam? I didn't support Saddam when we were playing cozy with him during the Iran-Iraq War, either. Likewise, I didn't support him while he viciously put down the rebellions in his own territories after the Gulf War, which gave me the sick feeling of Hungary 1956 all over again. They were choosing to overthrow him then and we didn't help. Why should they trust us now? The cynical eye squints: what do the Americans really want? The saddest thing of all is that I have to concede that I have to wonder what the Americans really want too; I have yet to hear anything out of this administration that was not dragged out of it, except that we are doing "the right thing". "Right"? Yes. Correct? Not so sure.

If our intelligence had really been so good, we could have assassinated the bastard with our smart bombs and avoided a lot of this. My crystal ball is in the shop, so I can't tell you what would have happened then, but honestly, I believe things might have turned out better, or at least a different kind of awful in which Americans were not looked on as the next group of oppressors. You can't tell me that all those people are terrorists from abroad. Especially not the Shi'ite militias who have families in Iraq.

But it's out of my hands now. I did my best.