hope
It's only going to get worse.
But I have the slightest bit of hope that things won't be as bad as they could. I saw two programs on television last night that gave me a glimmer of something. CSPAN showed Iraqi satelite news and one of the chief Iraqi statesmen indicated that he realized that most US and British citizens were against their dictatorial leaders. At least someone is paying attention...
Also, on CSPAN, I caught a debate about violence in Iraq that was rebroadcast from Saturday. There were two extremely well spoken journalist/professors who made an excellent case against violence, there was one guy who was on the fence, but generally supported a war, and there was one guy almost literally foaming at the mouth who spent his time degrading pretty much everyone, demanding the destruction of an entire country, and twitching a lot. Oh, and the moderator was doing a wonderful job mocking Bush, Blair, and the rabid vulture guy. It showed me that there are some powerful intellects proposing rational foreign relations.
One thing that keeps popping up, which I've never seen addressed, is the bizarre claim by the pro-violence crowd that "We've tried everything else! War is our last option!" Well, firstly, we need to identify what the actual problem is, before we can look at solutions. Unfortunately, the Bush Regime has yet to come up with a definitive problem in Iraq. They keep changing their story, and making up random lies to defend their position. We didn't start with a problem with Iraq - we started with a desire to start a war and then tried to justify our actions.
Secondly, lets look at what sort of solutions we've fully tried in a general effort to make Iraq a less hostile place:
1. War
2. Sanctions
That's it? Yup.
(We've also tried to conduct US inspections, but both times we've done so, no weapons of mass destruction were found, and, more importantly, both times the diplomatic inspections were abruptly halted by the US president.)
So we've tried two things. How can anyone in their right mind say that "we've tried everything"? All we've done so far is extreme violence and severe punishment. (War didn't work the first time, why do we thing it'll be any different this time?) What about trying one of the other thousand possibly solutions? How about legal action (through the World Court, or within the Iraqi legal system)? How about flooding peaceful Iraqi organizations with money, food, and other non-violent resources to give them strength to stand up to their dictator? How about just generally not acting like a big red white and blue asshole to people of a different race? Or, how about just ignoring them? (That's usually the preferred tactic with people who are acting up to get attention. Giving them attention generally just encourages them.) And, finally, have we even bothered to respect Iraqi citizens as human beings? (Heck the Bush administration doesn't even respect US citizens as human beings...)
Finally, for the sake of argument, let's pretend that Saddam is actually committing mass murder of the Kurds as we speak (as opposed to 15 years ago) and he's just made an appearance on tv to announced that he's figured out a way of combining nuclear weapons with biological weapons. And he's planning on attacking the US with nuclear germs no matter what we do. If this was the case, then, would we really be able to accomplish anything by attacking the country? Would it stop Saddam from wanting to use his weapons? Wouldn't it give him the excuse to use even more of them? A threatened, scared creature who feels cornered is a hell of a lot more dangerous than a puffed up creature who is angry but has a clear escape route.
