03.26.03 - 10:48 p.m.

man. am i the only one mesmerized by the war lately? i'm getting tired of watching the same thing day after day but i can't quite stop. i'm worried... well, look, at this point, peace protests aren't helpful. i'm just worried about the..... way this is going to happen. the growing anti-american sentiment bothers me, and i think we went into this all wrong, all wrong. and now the administration is making noises about how they see "a role" for un, but see the us administering iraq? uhm.... that's not the way to calm arab fears.

and so much history is tied up in the whole situation. france and britain divided the middle east, in the beginning of the century. britain had iraq, of course. heh. and they realized that they could control the country without ruling it, so they drafted this guy who had been king of syria to come be iraq's king. iraq... didn't follow any traditional national boundaries or whatnot, it was just... part of what fell when the ottoman empire fell.

and britain, of course, encouraged arab nationalism in order to destabilize the ottoman empire which was an enemy and a force in europe, and now arab nationalism comes around to bite us in the fucking ass.

and then, post-ww II, iran and iraq were client-states of the us and the soviet union. iraq was the ussr's, and iran the us's, but the shah was really repressive and brutalized his people, particularly the conservative religious element in the name of modernism... which we supported, which bit him and us in the ass with the iranian revolution.

and then, after the iranian revolution, we made quiet noises to iraq that we wouldn't really mind so much if they started a war with iran, and then - even though we knew they were using chemical weapons on the battlefield AND ELSEwhere, and even though we knew saddam was a stalinist (cult of personality, all about his personal power, crazy-ass motherfucker) and was repressing his people, we started aiding him, and even after we knew he was gassing the kurds, kept it up until he invaded kuwait.

and then, didn't finish the job. instead, we instituted a sanctions regime that did nothing to influence him to stop with the weapons of mass destruction and betrayed the revolt we encouraged the southern iraqi shiites to start, let saddam fly his helicopter gunships into the southern "no-fly zone" and kill 100,000 shiites. the whole thing with sanctions is they depend upon a rational government that gives a fuck about whether their people live or die. saddam doesn't, and didn't, and used that 12 years to consolidate his power, and whether or not you like him, who's to blame for the sanctions?

yeah, us.

so then we start a war, with a secretary of defense who is insisting that airpower is what will win it, with a president who didn't even -really- bother trying to get international approval for it: UN or NATO, it wouldn't matter, NATO might've been better because turkey is part of NATO, and a NATO action would've given turkey politicians a good damn reason to support it and let us use turkey to launch a northern front, relying on iraqi dissidents to inform us as to how the population of iraq is going to see us, and we let iraqi f'ing television keep broadcasting, and we have f'ing donald rumsfeld standing there condemning the iraqis for failing to heed the geneva conventions while our f'ing GOVERNMENT has detained 600 suspected terrorists (not all of whom are terrorists, mind you) in guantanomo bay cuba by calling them illegal combatents even thought THAT designation is supposed to be up to an international court, not donald f'ing rumsfeld, which only makes this goddamned country - which, mind you, i do believe has relatively uhm... laudable intentions (i don't think the military is deliberately dropping bombs on civilians, i do think they want to avoid civilian casualties, etc.) - look like the biggest goddamned liars and hypocrites the world has ever seen.

so: if you want peace in our world, demonstrating now and forgetting about iraq later does absolutely nothing to ensure peace in our world. stay informed about iraq, and keep an eye on washington so we really can win the peace. support, in the end, real democracy in iraq rather than another puppet government, and insist on significant aid to afghanistan to rebuild that country. stay current on world affairs and stay informed about history, and keep pressure on the politicians until we really are a country that lives up to our ideals.