KINGSTON, Jamaica - Yesterday's deadly bomb blasts in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities were bloody reminders of the country's continued instability and the fact that it could still collapse into a Balkanised entity, or even a completely failed state.
But perhaps the greater lesson from today's Iraq is of the dangers that lurk when citizens are cowed or cajoled into forfeiting independent thought in favour of intellectual conformity and the embrace of iterative policies by their governments.
Those bombings in Iraq, mainly in Shi'ite neighbourhoods, coincided with the 10th anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq by America's George W. Bush, purportedly to "disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger".