Our secret plans discovered!

From today’s Washington Post:

TUKH, Egypt, March 27 -- At the small farm where he grows onions and oranges, Hady Said Hassan wraps a pet sheep around his shoulders and stretches out his legs as his friends gather to watch the U.S.-led war against Iraq unfold on television.

"America has killed thousands of Iraqi children," said Hassan, 34, in this small town an hour's drive north of Cairo, the Egyptian capital. "They want to destroy Islam as a religion."

From his hairdressing salon in Amman, Jordan, Abdullah Alami, 37, said he believes the United States started the war to steal truckloads of oil for Israel. In glittery downtown Beirut, Hani Dannawi, 28, a bank employee, said he thinks the war is a ploy by the United States to colonize the Middle East; he thinks Syria and Lebanon will be next.

Here’s what we have to do throughout the Middle East, starting with Iran and Saudi Arabia: we should be parachuting offset printing machines. Let a thousand underground newspapers spring up to counter the state-run media that spreads this nonsense propaganda.

Why do these governments spread, indeed encourage, such obvious and hateful lies? Here’s noted Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis in the Wall Street Journal:

In the same way, the dictatorships that rule much of the Middle East today will not, indeed cannot, make peace, because they need conflict to justify their tyrannical oppression of their own people, and to deflect their peoples' anger against an external enemy. As with the Axis and the Soviet Union, real peace will come only with their defeat or, preferably, collapse, and their replacement by governments that have been chosen and can be dismissed by their people and will therefore seek to resolve, not provoke, conflicts. [Emphasis added]

A change is gonna’ come.