Much better!
Got a solid 5,500 words done over the weekend, which is great. Some nasty (or good, depending on how you look at it) things are starting to happen in the plot. Christina, Colonel Foyle's secretary, accidentally overheard a conversation between Foyle and NSA Agent Evans. She's now knows the essence of what Cold Witness really is. The "usual treatment" for such cases is for the NSA to murder or deport the person involved, but Foyle has thought up an alternative. He can protect her from Harvey and his superiors, but only if she joins his "core staff". The philosophy here is that you know nothing, or you know everything. Believe me, Christina will soon know stuff that she just doesn't want to know.
The latest news that Saddam Hussein has been captured. This is all to the good, obviously, but as a historian I can't help wondering what effect this will have on the overall picture. Will the war really end as quickly as the US generals hope? Will the hard core of Saddam supporters melt away? To be honest, I don't think they will. In the end, they'll keep on fighting after they've forgotten what they're fighting for. Iraq will never be the same again. Bush and Blair believe they can bring democracy to Iraq, but after studying German history very extensively, I'm confident that the Iraqi people a) don't want democracy, b) wouldn't know what to do with it if they had it, and c) will eventually revert back to a "strong leader"-type government, just like Germany did. If a country's been used to dictatorship for so long, democracy is a really bad thing to inflict on them. They don't know how to use it, and it will just cause more problems. At the end of the day, the Western powers don't really have the right to tell the Iraqis what kind of government they're going to have. We've gone in there looking for weapons of mass destruction, and we haven't found any. Can't we just leave it at that?
(Wow, this is turning into a political weblog entry). On the bright side, the European Constitution has been kicked out of the window. It looks like we in the British Isles can hold on to our national identity and freedom for a couple more years at least.
Got a solid 5,500 words done over the weekend, which is great. Some nasty (or good, depending on how you look at it) things are starting to happen in the plot. Christina, Colonel Foyle's secretary, accidentally overheard a conversation between Foyle and NSA Agent Evans. She's now knows the essence of what Cold Witness really is. The "usual treatment" for such cases is for the NSA to murder or deport the person involved, but Foyle has thought up an alternative. He can protect her from Harvey and his superiors, but only if she joins his "core staff". The philosophy here is that you know nothing, or you know everything. Believe me, Christina will soon know stuff that she just doesn't want to know.
The latest news that Saddam Hussein has been captured. This is all to the good, obviously, but as a historian I can't help wondering what effect this will have on the overall picture. Will the war really end as quickly as the US generals hope? Will the hard core of Saddam supporters melt away? To be honest, I don't think they will. In the end, they'll keep on fighting after they've forgotten what they're fighting for. Iraq will never be the same again. Bush and Blair believe they can bring democracy to Iraq, but after studying German history very extensively, I'm confident that the Iraqi people a) don't want democracy, b) wouldn't know what to do with it if they had it, and c) will eventually revert back to a "strong leader"-type government, just like Germany did. If a country's been used to dictatorship for so long, democracy is a really bad thing to inflict on them. They don't know how to use it, and it will just cause more problems. At the end of the day, the Western powers don't really have the right to tell the Iraqis what kind of government they're going to have. We've gone in there looking for weapons of mass destruction, and we haven't found any. Can't we just leave it at that?
(Wow, this is turning into a political weblog entry). On the bright side, the European Constitution has been kicked out of the window. It looks like we in the British Isles can hold on to our national identity and freedom for a couple more years at least.
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