Chalmers Johnson article (It's Time to Flee) is ridiculous on a variety of points. Comparing America's actions in the Middle East with Nazi Germany's execution of the Holocaust is one of them. Paper never refused ink, but come on - the Holocaust? Are you for-fucking-real? Is the fact that the Middle East has ALWAYS had problems unifying, and ALWAYS been regional, tribal and ethnic in its perceptions something you completely miss? Kind of like, uh, der, the PRESIDENT and his band of MORONS!?!

Another serious indictment is that "America" is to blame for the recent wars which have led to the fiscal incompetence of the Bush administration, and here Johnson uses "we". Do we blame the current generation of Germans for the Holocaust? Or even those Germans in their 90s? Short of bashing a whole generation, I ask of Johnson - do the Vietnamese still blame your generation, or our country, for the devastation of that little ugly American nightmare? I think they've gotten over it; will the Middle East? They don't get over anything - it's a cultural perception. A rape sparks a village-against-village dispute that lasts hundreds of years in that culture. "We" didn't create that.