Revolutionary Moderation

On to other topics



Just kidding! As if anyone, including me, is thinking about anything else! Ha, ha!



There seem to be some in the blog world who think we have to stop criticising the war because it is engaged. I don't think that's constructive. No more than ever, as FOX News reports blow-by-blow about how Jesus is beating Allah and ain't that just fine, dissent needs to be available to people who are looking for it.



At the same time, we can't stop it. That's likely been true since January but it is more obviously true now. So I'm not going to engage in much debate about Saddams WMD (little or none, probably), or connection to al Quada (certainly none), or the risk of long-term blowback (high, unless that's one delicious-looking democracy set up in the aftermath.) I got sucked into an argument back on the Yahoo discussion board I mentioned yesterday, but I'm trying to disengage.



It's the aftermath that we need to start talking about now. If the Americans simply forget about Iraq, or install a friendlier dictator, we're going to have a whole lot of angry Iraqis thinking they've been lied to again. We have to do better, way better, than we did in Afghanistan.



A piece of advice: for your own sanity, do not attempt to follow the war blow-by-blow. I don't need a television to know what's going on... I can learn more on the radio, and reading the web. Turn off the anxiety-inducing 24-hour news.



But if you are going to be fascinated blow-by-blow, don't tune in to me to get updates on how many miles north of Basra the 103rd Infantry is... I don't care, I can't do anything about it, and I would have to trust CNN to tell me the relevance of it. I don't trust CNN to tell me the temperature.