March 9, 2003 – The USSR had weapons of mass destruction and the atom bomb so they check-mated us. We use force against Iraq because we can and because the Administration feels the need to impose its self-righteous, simplistic world view on an entire region.

March 14, 2003 – Fear, says Jesse Jackson on NPR, is fueling everything at the cost of much that the international community and American citizens have believed in for 50 years or more. Fear rules our President and his government; fear of anyone who isn’t just like them – wealthy republican conservatives who live in guarded and gated communities or cower in “undisclosed locations”. Repeated alerts alarm the public and news management keeps it from making intelligent evaluations of choices of action and the news reports it hears. You don’t defeat terrorists by belittling and insulting your allies and “friends” in public. You work quietly to outsmart terrorists in cooperation with the like-minded. You don’t trumpet alerts and FEAR over the air-waves. You stand unafraid and quietly defiant. Neither do you make matters even worse by giving away hard earned treasury surplusses and basically bankrupting the nation to support your fearful, rigid, ideological ego!

March 15, 2003 – Have we become like the Germans of the 30’s and 40’s putting our brains on hold while our government wreaks havoc at home and abroad? Where is the thinking that has a sense of the ancient and more recent past that informs the actions of the present? Where are those who can stand and speak for them?

The polls and reporters all say that we all regurgitate our government’s line that Iraq is “evil” (1) because it has brutally imprisoned, tortured and murdered it’s own citizens. (So have we – native Americans, blacks, Japanese) (2) because it has weapons of “mass destruction” (the USA is the largest holder of WMD’s) (3) because Saddam is an “evil” dictator who has repressed his people (whom we supported and encouraged and aided with knowledge, skills, and hardware when it was convenient to do so). The pose of the Bush people and their justifications are a sham, a fake, and a disaster for all our grandchildren.

March 16, 2003 – Wouldn’t is be important to know what the UN inspectors might find and verify in the next 30 – 90 days in preparing for a successful attack? And ultimately, what difference will all this anxiety, anger, and flurry of media events make in the lives of any who will be affected by an unprovoked attack by the USA on a country that hasn’t threatened any other for 12 years?

March 17 – President Bush has pulled off an end run around the UN and his own Secretary of State, by giving this deadline of 48 hours for Saddam Hussein to leave his own country. And now we’re “for it” as the Brits say. How awful! How utterly stupid! How completely avoidable! And how costly of life and treasure on all sides.

The Bushies seem to be planning an empire in the Middle East based on very sketchy, if any, knowledge of the region, its history, language, or culture and on the assumption that “The-Right-Is-On-Our-Side” no matter what that informs the decisions of the so-called Christian Right. Rational thought doesn’t digest this kind of leap of faith. GW’s God had better hold him responsible for the awful calamity he is about to inflict on the world and its long-suffering people.

It’s stupid, stupid! Regardless of what the Bushies keep shouting in public, there is no credible reason of National Security to launch an attack on Iraq. There’s a desperation in this cry lately that betrays a kind of desertion panic rather than the confidence of the go-it-alone boasts of last summer.

Iraq does not have the power to attack us. It doesn’t even have the power to hit us with bio weapons. The big difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama Ben Laden’s organizations is that Hussein cares about his own survival in place. Ben Laden has put down no roots – no longer has a protected land base -so he must be more secret, more wiley, more clever than we (how easy!) and also more desperate for another spectacular strike. Thank God the world’s police are helping us while our government continues to insult its friends. Yes, Iraq can still hit its neighbors, but when has that ever stopped the USA under a Republican president from dealing with a “nasty” dictator?

Rumsfeld plays the brat on the playground when he labels Chirac and Schroeder as “Old Europe”. How unnecessarily insulting and childish! Like “New” Europe is the oh-so-powerful countries of Poland, Rumania, et al?

March 18 – The USA has “bought” the President’s false linkage between Osama Ben Laden and Saddam Hussein as one and the same kind of “terrorist” because the President has been out there repeating this falsehood over and over and over and over. When he isn’t repeating it others in the Administration are. And this constant hammering is based – as an infamous dictator said, if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it – on the basis of fear, but no real evidence whatever (other than fabricated documents so conveniently trotted out about the Iraqi nuclear weapons program). What will they say to the world if they find no WMD?

March 21 – We have perpetrated aggression against a country that posed no immediate threat to ourselves and that was already being contained. Now our so-called President is stuck with the hole he’s dug himself and us. All the power and “might” we have will not make up for the world’s opposition. There have been riots against the war in Egypt and many other places. We do not have real allies other than the UK and some of its former colonies. Our stab at decapitating the Iraqi leadership failed and only made them seemingly more defiant than ever. Guerrilla warfare has already begun.

Tonight it looks like a standstill with the “Coalition” in charge of the southern oil fields and trying to get in charge of the norther ones and troops on the ground strung out between Kuwait and Baghdad with not enough punch for anything like a “final solution”. So WHY didn’t they wait? WHAT was all the rush about?

March 24 – Will we have to be as brutal as Saddam to earn Iraqi respect? We might, but that won’t go down well at home or around the world given the level of instant and constant news coverage. The BBC is consistently better than our own “managed” news, even though all news is managed to some extent. At least the BBC isn’t constantly crowing about how wonderful our troops are.

Friday, March 07, 2003

It’s going to happen
Georgie is going to have his war. I can feel the inevitability like something I can touch in the air. The cost will be excruciating, and to what purpose. It’s all too depressing.

Saturday, March 01, 2003

War and Re-election
The war against Iraq will happen only because the Bush Administration seems to have based its 2004 reelection on the basis that victory over Iraq will make it a shoo-in. They also seem to have some “christian” evangelical idea of righting past wrongs (the so-called missed opportunities of 1991), ridding the country of its “evil” ruler, and establishing “democracy” in the tribal, clannish middle east where devious might has made right for centuries. Democracy as we know it? Ha! But if George gets elected to a 2nd term, he will crow that all the blood and destruction we worth it.