There is a pretty good (but long) piece in the Journal today about Iraq, Islam, conflicts and so on. But this one little bit caught my soul

.....unerring feel for the ways of the Arab world put it thus to me: "Iraq, the Internet, and American power are undermining the old order in the Arab world. There are gains by the day."

I am reminded of a conversation I had with a native Southerner decades ago concerning bigotry and backwardness of the Old South and why all this suddenly changed. "Television," was the one word answer, "Television showed all of us what the North and West had that we didn't, a hell of a lot of us transferred out of LSU and into colleges in the West and North." Back then it was TV that spread a different truth to the less than wealthy in the Southern states, today it is the Internet that is spreading a different truth to the Arab educated class. Keep paying your ISP bills and God only knows the end of it.