Evil regimes do not brainwash every member of their populations. They brainwash some, they threaten the majority into conforming, and a few manage to conspire against the regime and not get hung in the market square.

The difference between democracy and terrorist dictatorship is this: in terrorist dictatorship, only those who agree with the government have a public voice. Those with good ideas are silenced.

One of the vilest things about the antiwar left is their argument that ordinary Iraqis did not want the invasion. As there was no democracy in Iraq, it was more or less impossible to guage how many ordinary Iraqis wanted the invasion. But it took more than three or four to destroy all those statues of Saddam; cheer the American troops; run the new interim Iraqi democratic government. Let's see how many turn out to vote, and how many refuse to participate in democracy on the grounds that they prefer to live under dictatorship.

There are, of course, be some people in Iraq who think they want (or really do want) an evil terrorising dictatorship. Most of those want it because they want to be it. However, there are an awful lot of people who do not want that. All they have been needing is the opportunity to argue their ideas in the public arena without being murdered (ie, to argue their ideas in the public arena period).

All this is far, far more fundamental and important than anything to do with the actual nature of the ideas they want to discuss. Where there is debate, there can be political growth. Where there is no debate, it's impossible.

That is why this is a war on more than just ideas. It is a physical, material war, involving real deaths and real bombings: yes, driven by conscious thinking humans, with the ambition of enabling people's ideas to grow, but still a war and not a chat round a big round table (or on the internet). The difference between those two things is the difference between civilised growth and barbarism. In other words, we are having to act according to the rules of the barbaric in order to attempt to institute something better in the moral blackspots of the world, for the sake of everyone's future. It's not pretty, and it's not persuasion. But sometimes, civilised people have to meet barbaric people on the only ground those people are prepared to occupy, in order to defeat them. And that means, by the use of force. Not discussion.

Then the war (not really a war at all- a process of rational growth by the exchange of ideas instead of violence) on conspiracy theories can begin.

Alice