Clintster's So-Called Life

And so it begins...

I didn't find out about the beginning of the war until about 10:30 tonight. I'd been watching South Park when the President went on TV to announce that we... THEY had started bombing Baghdad, so I missed what I'm sure was a "stirring" speech.

Frankly, I'm deflated. Oh, I'm sure that the government will find a way to make this a short and (for our side) bloodless war, and that Iraq would be better off without Saddam Hussein holding sway over the country, but I still feel that this could have been avoided.

It seems as if the President and his administration have been completely set upon taking Iraq out, consequences be damned. after 9/11, nearly every nation in the world sent their condolences to the US, with the exception of Iraq and Afghanistan. Even then, the Iraqis sent their condolences to the people rather than the government of the United States. We could have used this goodwill to truly form a coalition to wipe out international terrorism.

Instead, the people we almost elected have chosen to waste all that goodwill in an effort to remove a man who, though evil and despotic, has not gone out of his way to harm or threaten any other nation since 1991, when the world bloodied his nose a little. I have so many questions about the validity of the administration's claims that they're hiding weapons of mass destruction, but I don't think I could ever get a straight answer from anyone.

So what happens now? If we go in and Iraq uses WMDs, it could set off a chain of events that I fear could result in the first wartime detonation of a nuclear device since 1945, and NOT by the Iraqis. If we go in and we find that Iraq never had WMDs in their possession, then this will have been all for nothing; just a 21st century snatch and grab for lebensraum. Would our government be so devious as to plant phony evidence in Iraq just to show that they did have something to fight for?

I'm sick of it all. I'm sick of the countdown clocks, I'm sick of the war experts, I'm sick of the front-line journalists on aircraft carriers and at secret locations with America's soldiers, I'm sick of the parading and the shouting down of anyone who dares mention the five-letter word (p-e-a-c-e), and I'm sick of the news networks acting like this is the gonna be the world's biggest episode of The A-Team.

The economy's in the toilet, the skyline of our largest city has been forever altered, we're now the second most hated nation in the world (with a bullet), and we're going to invade another country with or without the power of NATO, the UN, or reason behind us.

Then again, isn't it great to have a president who never had sex with an intern?

Christ, I miss the late '90s.