...where we were to be welcomed as liberators, the streets strewn with sweet-smelling flowers...and the seeds that we had so heroically sown in the hearts of our (littler) arab brothers, of love and peace and democracy, which they would not have understood properly but for our philanthropic promptings...that these seeds would then bear fruit throughout the entire middle-east, in Egypt (ahem!), Syria, Iran (ahem!!), Saudi Arabia (say nothing!), Palestine (oh my!), Libya..etc etc etc...

and all this was to flow, we were assured by the wise, boorish ones...all this from our Iraq adventure, done for right reasons (that turned out to be untrue) by good people (who did not 'knowingly' lie about it all) out of a generous impulse (which effected huge civilian slaughter)...

the policies of Dubya and The Stray Shooter have served as the greatest instrument in radicalising Islamic youth globally, on such a scale that Osama might never have wished for in his wildest dreams...but competing fundamentalisms tend to have that affect, one on the other....the moderate middle is passed-over, while the extremes on either end are fueled for full scale lunacy...

"the best lack all conviction/
while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity..."

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"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."