I’m sure everyone and their sister will post this bit from the latest New Yorker’s article on the Kurdish reponse to the US invasion, but here it is anyway:

It is virtually impossible to find anyone in Kurdistan who is opposed to the war against Saddam’s regime. People on street corners ask for american flags or photographs of George Bush; the appreciation of the United States extends to the intellectual class. sherko Bekas, who was described to me as Kurdistan’s unofficial poet laureate, was particularly upset by the well-publicized efforts of American poets to stop the war. “Saddam is the god of war,” Bekas said, when I saw him at his office at a publishing firn in Sulaimaniya. “He is the killer of poetry.” He went on, “I say to thse poets that if they lived for two weeks under Saddam’s rule they would write verse in reverse. They would write poems asking Bush to attack Saddam sooner.”

As they used to say in Japan, “So many men, so many minds.”