QUOTE: Crooked Timber:
"The anointing of the Iraqi resistance as the heirs of Mazzini is as wrong-headed as the view that some leftists took that the Iran of 1979 was a return to revolution’s classical forms, with all that Islamic talk just being surface ideological froth. Since Nabulsi’s concern is with democracy, it seems reasonable to ask whether the Iraqi people’s best chance of actually implementing self-government is via the progressive taking of power by the existing governing council and its successors and through eventual free elections, or via the triumph of armed resistance groups. And it really doesn’t help in deciding that question to see anyone as being the incarnation of the ideal of popular sovereignty. The worry with the governing council is, of course, that they remain puppets of the US forever ; the hope is that they gradually become more resistant to outside influence. But the armed resistance groups are likely to bring about not democracy but bloodletting and revenge followed one form of brutal dictatorship or another (religious or secular)."
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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