On an unseasonably warm June day in Santiago, nearly 1,500 Chileans gathered behind the presidential palace to pay homage to Salvador Allende on the centennial of his birth. The police had erected a fence-like barrier to separate the assembled politicians and dignitaries—all dressed in elegant suits and ties or stylish winter dresses with colorful shawls wrapped around their shoulders—from the public, which was composed primarily of scruffy students, aging revolutionaries, blue-collar workers, reporters, and a few stray businesspeople out on their lunch break. Every five minutes or so, a portly man wearing a hard hat raised a bullhorn to his mouth and yelled, "Comrade Salvador Allende!" Immediately the crowd answered, "Present!"
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Here's a thesis to try out on friends: The anti-war movement, in its current form, is an unwitting complement to US government policy, not an opposition to it. It will enable a cowardly premature withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, an event that will be a horrendous betrayal of the Iraqis we promised to "liberate" and a complete failure of political imagination, and which both the Bush administration and the anti-war movement will claim as a victory. Read More

"Right now, terrorists are trying to kill me.
My wife and family are faraway,
and the people I work with are idiots.
My name is SFC John H.
I am a US Soldier.
This has been the longest year of my life."
—from the blog John of Arabia

Never have soldiers in a war been equipped with so much personal technology. It's not just backpack missiles. "You literally can't go 30 seconds without hearing a Kylie Minogue tune or Beethoven's Symphony in C Minor emanating from someone's pocket," grumbled journalist Kevin Sites in his blog. Sites would later videotape a U.S. Marine killing an unarmed man in a mosque, provoking international controversy, but that day in Kuwait, still waiting to cross the border, the image that stayed with him was the glow of laptops, temporarily left alone by their users: "One by one, the ghostly images of wives, children, girlfriends, husbands, pets, slowly appear[ed] from the depths of cyberspace—as screensavers." Read More