'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

"THE BUSHITES' WAR OF GLOBAL

"THE BUSHITES' WAR OF GLOBAL INSURRECTION": Today, I wrote a column of that title for Al-Hayat. I can't give you the whole text, since it takes them a few days to translate it into Arabic and then schedule it for publication.

The funny thing is, I actually started out this morning planning a column on a different (though related) subject. As often happens, it was the process of writing itself that helped me to sift and clarify my thoughts.

The one I was starting to write was on how the Bushites have worked hard -- and with some success-- at jumping right over any reasoned discussion of whether the US should go to war against Saddam's Iraq, keeping the discussion instead on secondary issues like how to do it, what kind of a wonderful regime they'll build there afterwards (!) etc etc.

Actually, I've more or less written that one already, though not in quite this way for Al-Hayat. The exploration of just how insurrectionary the threatened (or, already starting) military campaign will be for the entire, post-1648 inter-state system is something I've been thinking about for several weeks now. So I'm glad I got those thoughts down on paper.