You can't establish a state by flower power anywhere. Building a state, more often than not, is a brutal, authoritarian process. You can see that by looking at the history of just about any state. The degree of brutality depends much less on state builders' ideology than on the their circumstances. There is no question that state building in Iraq will be brutal and authoritarian, incomparably more brutal and authoritarian than the Iranian Revolution, especially given that any builder of state there is now faced with the task of expelling the US military _and_ killing or otherwise neutralizing brutal, authoritarian terrorists of the Al Qaeda tendency. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>