…there’s been another sign of semi-intelligent life on the WSJ editorial page—Daniel Johnson’s piece recommending that occupied Iraq be put through a process similar to the post-WWII “de-Nazification” of western Europe. That’s something else we could use here. I invite all of you to email your suggestions about just how aw the U.S. could be successfully de-Reaganized.

…has become a peurile playpen for W.’s infantile power-suckups; unchallenging and unreadable except as a cheap energy-boost (if you already agree with those guys) or a cheap laff (if you don’t). So it’s surprising to find something intelligent there, such as Stanley Kurtz’s longish peace detailing what it might take to bring real democracy to Iraq. Kurtz’s scenario involve supporting many of the same institutions (especially schools that teach critical thinking instead of mere rote memorization) the GOP sleazemongers are systematically out to destroy over here.

This, of course, begs the question of what needs to be done to establish real democracy in the U.S. Several egghead theorists have written long, near-impenetrable tomes on the topic. I hope to read some of them in the next couple weeks and get back to you.

ROBERT FISK, the UK pundit who’s become a demi-hero to antiwar North Americans, now claims the occupation of Iraq is now “going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined….”

…AND NEWSWEEK‘S ANNA QUINDLEN proclaims that “each time the United States becomes imperial, it betrays the very keystone upon which its greatness rests.”

HAROLD MEYERSON ponders whether the current White House occupant might be the “most dangerous president ever…”

…WHILE ARIANNA HUFFINGTON explains “Why The Anti-War Movement Was Right.”

…”we need to make love to the Iraqis after we’ve made war.”

…went on in Seattle and other cities worldwide on Saturday, despite the war having been mostly turned into an occupation mission by the previous Thursday. As I’d expected it to be, it was a smaller affair with a greater concentration of the hardcore protest community, some of whom went “off topic” with speeches and signs about assorted other issues. It also attracted a couple of aged-male dittohead counter-protestors shouting, vehement but pre-practiced insults.

Yes, I still believe those of us who protested this war were right to have done so.

Saddam Hussein could’ve been restrained and/or removed without this life- and infrastructure-wasting tragedy. The twelve years of sanctions only kept him and his cronies iin power while impoverishing the rest of the nation. And the UN weapons inspections were working, it now turns out. Saddam was effectively a threat only to his own citizens.

Because Iraq’s government and institutions were designed solely to serve him, he leaves behind a big nothing, a land without a society except that of the US/UK occupation force and the long-simmering ethnicities and other revenge-minded factions.

Iraq might seem now like a big-budget version of Panama or Grenada, a quick-and-relatively-clean invasion/coup. But it puts the U.S. in what still might become a morass of Vietnam proportions.

We’re now going to create, and will have to keep propping up, a client state with powerful, permanent, internal and external opposition. The Republicans talk about promoting “democracy” there, but will certainly try to devise a system in which U.S. stooges and yes-men have all the power. The Islamic fundamentalists (whom Saddam was never one of) will exploit this at every opportunity. This could get messier and messier for years to come.

Antiwar “radicals” like to oversimplify geopolitical situations even more than prowar “conservatives” do. But complication is what we’re gonna get anyway.

Some side topics:

• That much-telecast image of a Saddam statue’s demolition was probably a staged media event created entirely by the US military, with a couple dozen Iraqis brought in as extras.
• Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate for everybody except US business interests.

RICK GIOMBETTI writes at Eat the State:

“We have long since passed the stage in our history when opposition to militarism are merely values to be cherished. Given the awesome destructive power of the weapons at our government’s disposal, we have no choice but to oppose the Bush administration’s belligerence. It is a prerequisite for our survival.”

…MARGARET ATWOOD has written an open letter to America:

“If you proceed much further down the slippery slope, people around the world will stop admiring the good things about you. They’ll decide that your city upon the hill is a slum and your democracy is a sham, and therefore you have no business trying to impose your sullied vision on them. They’ll think you’ve abandoned the rule of law. They’ll think you’ve fouled your own nest.The British used to have a myth about King Arthur. He wasn’t dead, but sleeping in a cave, it was said; in the country’s hour of greatest peril, he would return. You, too, have great spirits of the past you may call upon: men and women of courage, of conscience, of prescience. Summon them now, to stand with you, to inspire you, to defend the best in you. You need them.”

…has done it again, by making and then not releasing a pro-peace music video in such a way that it would gain even more exposure. Too bad she still can’t act.

…a long, impassioned rant about what he insists is a war being fought for “a superpower’s self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony.”

The fundamentalists in Washington DC want to turn the clock back to the 19th century; the fundamentalists in the Middle East want to turn the clock back to the 18th century. Neither side is particularly fond of real democracy; each would guiltlessly order its own troops to (even tactically) worthless deaths for the sake of “honor” or the purity of the cause.

This also isn’t a matter of “winning” or “losing.” Saddam will eventually disappear from the world stage; though a regime as internally repressive as his could easily survive after him, even with US backing. At this point, it’s become a matter of minimizing or stopping the meaningless carnage, and of halting the neocons’ dreams of empire abroad and their war against freedom at home.

DAVID CORN wonders whether the war, and the W regime, might soon stumble upon the “Hubris of the Neocons.”

CLEVER ENTREPRENEURS have designed a pro-peace, pro-love, and pro-active T-shirt bearing the slogan “French Kiss for Peace.”

THIS SUNDAY, the Seattle Times ran a long and lovely story about the Grand Illusion Theater, where I curated a strange-matinees series in 1987 and where, under the name The Movie House, the Seattle alterna-film exhibition scene began back in 1970. Under various owners over the years (it’s currently part of the nonprofit Northwest Film Forum), the 78-seat GI has epitomized the best of the Seattle filmgoing scene: Friendly curiosity, wild eclecticism, and a healthy indifference to celebrity BS.

The same day the times ran its Grand Illusion piece, Scarecrow Video held a public wake at its Roosevelt Way digs for the store’s founder George Latsois. (He’d died earlier in the month, from the brain cancer that had forced him to sell the store four years ago.)

Latsois essentially took the aforementioned Seattle film-consumption aesthetic and built a video-rental superstore around it. He’d started with a handful of Euro-horror titles he’d consigned to the old Backtrack Records and Video store north of U Village (a sponsor of my matinees at the Grand Illusion). From there he opened his own 500-title store on Latona Ave. NE, which by 1993 had grown to take over a former stereo store on Roosevelt.

He built it from there according to that mid-’90s local business mantra, “Get Big Fast.” It had 18,000 titles when it moved to Roosevelt and over 60,000 now. But like many other local ’90s entrepreneurs, Latsois spent more money on expansion than he was bringing in. He became ill before he could sort it out, but the new ex-Microsoftie owners have honorably continued the store’s operations and its wide-ranging buying policies (want DVDs of Korean films dubbed into Chinese? They got ’em!).

Scarecrow Video, and the Grand Illusion four blocks away on University Way, are hallmarks of the city’s intelligence and unpretentious sophistication. These qualities were quite ludicly expressed in the current Seattle Weekly cover story. In a lengthy essay originally commissioned for The Guardian (that Brit paper that’s become the newspaper of record for un-embedded war coverage), local UK expatriate

Jonathan Raban depicts a city where just about everybody (except the cops and the sleaze-talk radio hosts) is adamantly antiwar, from the coffeehouses to the opera house. Around here we don’t have to escalate Bush-bashing protests into disruptive confrontations, because we’d rather try to send a more positive message out to the world.

Compare Raban’s depiction of the local antiwar movement with that of the current Stranger, which trots out that ages-old self-defeatist whine that Seattle’s (fill-in-the-blank) isn’t an exact copy of a (fill-in-the-blank) in San Francisco and therefore automatically sucks.

I say Seattle people only accomplish anything when they don’t settle for imitating shticks from down south, but instead dare to create their own stuff. We don’t have to break things or shut the city down to get out point across. We can forge our own path toward a less-stupid, less-violent world. We can show, by daily examples large and small, individual and massive, that, as they said in the WTO marches, another world is possible.

MORE LINKS TO LINKS to war commentary worth the time and eyestrain:

• The Q Factor
• Uggabugga
• Tower of Babel

…and against prowar Democrats, are offered up by an anonymous North Carolinian at Monkeytime’s Monkey Media Report.