Condi reaches for war support

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's speech in Tuscaloosa on Friday included a comparison of the Iraqi democracy's difficult first days to the 1960s civil rights movement. Except, of course, the civil rights movement occurred in a country that had almost two centuries of republican government under its belt to condition citizens to seek change through peaceful, democratic means rather than terrorism or open warfare. Also, it didn't begin after the Canadian army took Washington.

A University of Alabama political science professor noted that "governmental forms aren't completely divorced from underlying cultural attitudes and beliefs" and said Rice's analogy may be "very appealing," but "[i]t's not demonstrably true on its face."