Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, it is right in the midst of the major energy reserves in the world. Its been a primary goal of US policy since World War II to control what the State Department called "a stupendous source of strategic power" and one of the greatest material prizes in history.

There's a tremendous gap between public opinion and public policy.

Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'.

Most of the population in America is disenfranchised. It doesn't matter what they think. Just look at the passionate rhetoric about how we can't stand by when a country uses weapons to kill innocent civilians.

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.

If you want to make changes in the world, you're going to have to be there day after day doing the boring, straightforward work of getting a couple of people interested and building a slightly bigger organization and carrying out the next move and suffering frustration and finally getting somewhere. That's how the world changes.

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.