I've been thinking about that lately -- minus the quotes around dictatorship. Don't the neocons sound like the worst authoritarian Leninists? The promise is the advent of Middle East democracy by way of foreign occupation. The US military is the one true vanguard of freedom in the region, and must seize power over a nation in order to relinquish it to the Arab populace. Same horseshit, different stall.
Or as Lewis Lapham said of the neocons:
"Better understood as radical nationalists than as principled conservatives, they deploy the logic endorsed by the American military commanders in Vietnam (who found it necessary to destroy a village in order to save it), and they offer the American people a choice similar to the one presented by the officers of the Spanish Inquisition to independent-minded heretics -- give up your liberty, and we will set you free."
That's a demand I'm listening for in Iraq as groups independent of the US begin to claim the nation as their own. Zizek said of contemporary US led interventions (in _The Fragile Absolute_, "Victims, Victims Everywhere") that it is OK to help the _helpless_ so long as they do not _cast off this helplessness_. If so, the Iraqis are only deserving of liberation so long as they're victims. When they act as political agents in their own right, they forfeit their claim to liberation. That, more than any secular principles (which I am *not* saying are irrelevant), is what I suspect is behind the anxiety over Shia mobilization.
-- Shane
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