People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell





After giving some thought to what I said yesterday about the violence in Iraq being a coup, I've reconsidered. I think it can be more accurately called a revolution. A coup is a battle for control of an existing government, a revolution is the removal of an existing government and replacing it with an entirely different structure.

The terms have come to be used interchangeably through the ongoing bastardization of the english language by politicians and news hacks.

Could Americans though come to refer to the people committing the acts of violence against their soldiers, as revolutionaries? The term revolutionary has a lot of historic cache in the US lexicon, conjuring images of George Washington, and other heroes.

However, one could argue that the United States represents a tyrannical force that has pressed a boot to the throat of the Iraqi people.The people advocating, through force of arms and explosives that the americans should leave are the same as Washington's minutemen at Valley Forge. Attacking from the shadows at an oppressive infrastructure, that's how the American Revolution started.