So, in the odd moments when I have spare time - it's 5:14am as I write this - I've been trying to read Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One.

This passage stuck with me:

"In 1951 I was going to grade school. One of the things we were trained to do was to hide and take cover under our desks when the air-raid sirens blew because the Russians could attack us with bombs. We were also told that the Russians could be parachuting from planes over our town at any time. These were the same Russians that my uncles had fought alongside only a few years earlier. Now they had become monsters who were coming to slit our throats and incinerate us. It seemed peculiar. Living under a cloud of fear like that robs a child of his spirit. It's one thing to be afraid when somebody's holding a shotgun on you, but it's another thing to be afraid of something that's just not quite real. There were a lot of folks around who took this threat seriously, though, and it rubbed off on you. It was easy to become a victim of their strange fantasy. I had the same teachers in school that my mother did. They were young in her time and elderly in mine. In American History class, we were taught that they couldn't destroy America with guns or bombs alone, that they would have to destroy the constitution - the document that this country was founded founded upon."

(It's part of one unbroken paragraph in the original, too).

Maybe it's because I'm blessed and cursed with an encore viewing of the reactionary Red Dawn each time I go up north, but when I read the above, I had to consider what I would do if I saw commie parachutes popping in the sky like mushrooms after a rain, which, inevitably made me consider what I'd feel like as an Iraqi citizen right now.

Then I was pointed toward this: Foreign Affairs - Iraq: Learning the Lessons of Vietnam - Melvin R. Laird, where I was struck by this passage, among many:

"The president must articulate a simple message and mission. Just as the spread of communism was very real in the 1960s, so the spread of radical fundamentalist Islam is very real today. It was a creeping fear until September 11, 2001, when it showed itself capable of threatening us. Iraq was a logical place to fight back, with its secular government and modern infrastructure and a populace that was ready to overthrow its dictator. Our troops are not fighting there only to preserve the right of Iraqis to vote. They are fighting to preserve modern culture, Western democracy, the global economy, and all else that is threatened by the spread of barbarism in the name of religion. (emphasis mine) That is the message and the mission. It is not politically correct, nor is it comforting. But it is the truth, and sometimes the truth needs good marketing."

It's odd to me that we're fighting - and killing - so very many 'insurgents'* in this far away land. Are they all fundamentalist wacko terrorists from other countries who have been drawn to Iraq and the opportunity to strike martyr-blows against the great western Satan? Or are the dead simply Iraqis who struggle against an invader with the fierce autonomous reflex that the Eckert family brought to bear against the commie invaders in Red Dawn? Is there really much of a difference? Are they 'insurgents' or 'freedom fighters'?

I agree that stopping radical religious fundamentalists is an important thing - nobody wants to be ruled by a religion they didn't elect into power, don't believe in and can't tolerate.

So I can imagine what the Iraqis are going through.

*Here I must point out the artful framing job the administration is attempting to perform - as in Vietnam, the dead civilians are always the enemy. After all, the dead are in no position to dispute what they did or believed while they were living.