Now I know that I have called the administration "radical," but little did I know they were Trotskyists!. (Christopher Hitchens has observed that only a Stalinist would say "Trotskyite".)

The connection is not as tenuous as you might think. A number of commentators—Ian Buruma for one, Michael Lind for another—have recently observed that the architects of the Iraq war, and several of its most articulate supporters, seem transfixed by Trotsky's idea of a "permanent revolution," orchestrated on a very large scale. Yesterday it was decadent capitalist democracies that looked on the brink of transformation. Today it is the billion people held captive by "fascist" tyrants in the Middle East. In both instances the agent of change is an idea—the idea of oppositionism.