Baath Revisited

Sigh. We've yet to see how serious this is, but the fact that the Maliki administration is concerned about a Baath Party resurgence is pretty frightening, That said, the Maliki administration is probably corrupt to the bone. It just goes to prove another of my long standing maxims--this from Robert M. Pirsig of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance fame:

"There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’ who wants them to live meaningless
lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is
willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just
because it is meaningless ... The true system, the real system, is our
present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and
if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left
standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory."

It's just that simple. And the reason, Middle East experts were saying before we ever invaded, what a stupid idea it was. Democracy came to Europe after two thousand years of war. Democracy was exported to the Americas by the Europeans. If the Middle East wanted democracy they'd have moved to it generations ago. Eastern civilization is much older than ours in many respects. Even so, let's hope they don't produce another factory. Enlightened leadership is what they need-whether or not its democratic.