You fasten the triggers / For the others to fire / Then you set back and watch / When the death count gets higher

One of the questions I get asked repeatedly these days is "what exactly are you doing in Bali". Quite a lot actually. But one of the pleasures of the jump from Auckland is having the time to read more. I read a lot and I find the time to read through long things like this, an excerpt from which is below

Faced with such complexity, and determined to have their war and their democratic revolution, the President and his counselors looked away. Confronted with great difficulties, their answer was to blind themselves to them and put their faith in ideology and hope -- in the dream of a welcoming landscape, magically transformed. The evangelical vision may have made the sense of threat after September 11 easier to bear but it did not change the risks and the reality on the ground. The result is that the wave of change the President and his officials were so determined to set in course by unleashing American military power may well turn out to be precisely the wave of Islamic radicalism that they had hoped to prevent.

Written by Mark Danner and due for publication in the December 21 edition of the NY Review of Books, if you have the time this rather lengthy piece is a fascinating analysis of the hubris, deceit and incompetence that is and was the Bush invasion of Iraq.