Cycho Librarian

I swore I wasn't going to do it. I said I would savor it, take my time, relish every word. It didn't happen. I reread the series, cover to cover, starting last week. I finished book 6 Thursday night. With shaking hands, I slowly opened the book at lunch on Friday and began to read. The end of my lunch hour came too soon. Around 10:00 I hit page 200-something and there was a lull in the story. I turned to my wife and said "Good, I can get some sleep now." No sooner had I gone upstairs than the book was open again. So I turned on the TV in the background. Maybe I could distract myself to the point I could put it down. When Conan came on I thought, maybe I should go to sleep now. But my heart was literally pounding. I couldn't stop thinking about the book. Conan ended and I turned off the TV. Big mistake. Now there was nothing to distract me. My heart rate hadn't dropped. I had to know what happened. At 4:30, I found myself cheering out loud through...

"There's a good reason they're called al-Qaeda in Iraq, because they are al-Qaeda in Iraq," Hmm. That certainly may be the case right now Shrub, but don't you think you're missing the larger picture here? Have you paused to ask yourself why they are called al-Qaeda in Iraq? After all, the choice of name was really always up to them. It is now known with as much certainty as one can have in matters of international espionage that there was no al-Qaeda presence in Iraq prior to the United States' invasion. And with good reason: Saddam Hussein saw them as a threat to his absolute power in the country. Additionally, Hussein would never have wanted the sort of Theocracy that al-Qaeda was promoting. So we move in and remove the only source of stability (evil though it may have been) in a sharply ethnically divided area. In the subsequent power vacuum, naturally many different forces were going to try to seize power. Equally naturally, those forces would r...