Stone Cold Pimpin'

This is Robert Fisk's excellent article on a year of war in Iraq. From the London Independent.

Iraq: a year of war

But we also have to face a fact: that Arab societies seem to be uniquely capable of absorbing these dictatorships, of playing along with the 99.9 per cent presidential election victories, and the secret policemen and the torture chambers, and the lies and distortions - able even (here is the difficult part) to give real loyalty to the monsters we decided should rule them.