I scanned all the letters posted to this thread, but it seems that no one can bring up THE most obvious question. If, after the invasion, Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki had estimated that it would take approximately 400,000 troops to 'pacify' Iraq and establish social order, and was promptly shut down, how will 20K troops make any difference at all?

The idea behind the initial occupation/liberation was that after you roll the Iraqi Army, while the resistance was still disorganized, you would need 250K-400K troops to secure the country. Donald Rumsfield laughed, and said, 'no, 80K troops'.

All this has turned out to be a farce, of course. But what I find strange, and I am now BEGGING Salon, or even the alternate media who has access to these people, is to throw away the rhetoric of the moment and ask the impertinent question, that is NOT getting asked. "Why are you now right, AEI/neocons, and Shinseki, who actually managed to run a country pacification exercise, wrong?"

This is all only 3-4 years ago. Forgetting history is one thing-- this is the present.

I agree with everything that Chris Hedges says-- as someone living in E. Washington/N. Idaho for the last 19 years-- somewhat a resurrection site/birthplace of a lot of this defective ideology, I stand amazed when I talk to a local newspaper publisher and he's never heard of Christian Identity, the Full Bible movement, or a lot of the other extreme right religious groups that feed toxic mythology toward the center-right. These groups are right in our backyard.

As far as whether the current version is fascist or not-- of course, they're fascist. But what Hedges doesn't say in his interview (maybe in his book) is that we are watching a long arc from before WWII when the movement really did support Hitler. It was the main thing that discredited groups like the John Birch society, and it has taken them, through manipulation of the Cold War, and now the inward crusade regarding ostensible moral decay, to regain their pre-eminence.

It's all rather frightening, because in many ways, written by more astute social critics than myself, the suburbs as a concept were built on the notion of racial hatred-- and the fact that we haven't managed to change the fundamental architecture of our living spaces is helping drive this movement. If architecture and physical community structure wasn't so important to driving fascism, then why was Hitler such a fan of Speer?

The scary thing is, of course, that we're truly approaching our real crisis-- bake the planet or run out of gas. Both are going to require rational thinking, or the movement that has crystallized under the likes of Robertson and Roberts are going to own the day with mythology. I'd encourage liberals of all ilks to work on understanding these folks, as well as recruiting more of us. And if it takes some anger, so be it. But don't let it interfere with the clear head that is going to be required to think our way out of this.

I was disappointed to hear the authors whom I really respect, like Traister, let the trolls get to them. I'm not going to sit around and moralize and tell them to get tough-- but that's what has to happen.

As an old-time activist, I've stood in front of a crowd of 400 screaming people yelling for my death, with little or no support around me to keep that from happening. It's part of the game. I wasn't scared-- killing me would have been difficult, and I would have taken a couple of them with me. Maybe I'm just brain-dead, but I've always figured that in a complacent world, the BEST thing that can happen is to see people react. Jethro Tull said it best-- "I may make you feel, but I can't make you think." In a world where we accept science-fiction warfare against an entire region (think the Middle East) as something nominally acceptable and something easily ignorable, the least we can do for the masses that are really suffering is take the heat. No one said that being a prophet is easy-- because it isn't.

All writers that write in hope of social change have to accept, fundamentally, what I call the power of latency-- that ideas you advance now will cause you to be scorned and spurned, but will become the mainstream. Think of Martin Luther King-- or Malcolm X. No one anywhere will dare speak against diversity.

And even in my small world-- regarding protection of roadless forests-- the former Governor of Idaho stepped forward just two months ago, in this, the reddest of Red States, and declared, fundamentally, his support for protection of our remaining wild forests. Quite a change for only ten years, where predecessors had been arguing for clearcutting the lot of it.

The game is not for the meek. It is just a fact. Time to face it-- or get out.