Our imaginations are inhabited by ghosts

You know me and first sentences. That's the first sentence of:

An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin 1994.

This book is exciting and readable, mapping out the development of human interaction in the first two chapters in a way that stimulates me to type this rather than take it easy on a lovely autumnal Saturday morning.

Today is the day of the election in Iraq. There's a news article on msn that has this paragraph:

"North of the capital in Sunni Duluiya, militants" (rather than say, terrorists) "toured the town" (who writes this stuff?) "handing out leaflets" (what, these gangs of scary thugs just gently handed out leaflets, I am not buying it) "threatening to kill anyone who voted."

As my colleague Chris says "words are life threatening". Indeed!

And poor journalism does my head in.

At Samizdata today, an interesting discussion is going on in the comments section about the justification for the Iraq War, with a ton of commenters making pithy, killers comments about the weapons of mass destruction:

"the justification was overwhelming"
"(Sadam) had the desire plus a track record"
"you are yet another person who has allowed this fact to slip from your memory"

Read the whole thing here, very enjoyable.

I'd like to end by quoting PJ O'Rourke, p. 15, "Peace Kills"

"Fascists do bad things just to be bad. "I'm the baddest dude in Baghdad," Saddam Hussein was saying, "the baddest cat in the Middle East. I'm way bad." This was stupid. But fascists are stupid. Consider Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. He didn't have any. How stupid does that make Saddam? All he had to do was say to UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, "Look where you want. Look under the couch cushions. Look under my bed. Look in the special spider hole I'm keeping for emergencies." And Saddam Hussein could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld is elected head of the World Council of Churches."