I wouldn't have thought the piece I would post o­n this infamous day, would be from Arab News but this moves me deeply. It's a resonance with my Arab brothers and sisters — I could have written it. This is the voice of a people, and it can be sounded by any of them for all the rest. Be sure you get to the astonishing ending.

I would add a few thoughts. I cannot shake the picture of it being some mix-up here, where we lost a distinction between games and for real. How can we be playing war games with weapons that actually kill? This morning, o­n the Today Show, they were talking about tanks having a hard time in cities — they were built for the battlefield. Part of the story involved video simulations that the tank occupants practice o­n. What in true hell is this that we would play this game for real?

As I grasp for the world adding up, I keep thinking the powers that be must know something I don't know. Otherwise, how could you add up the certain horrors of war, plus its possible horrors, and have that come out to be less awful than Hussein staying in power? How can we provoke the use of weapons of mass destruction and have that not be as bad as o­ne vicious head of state, among others — o­ne who is feared by his people rather than supported by them and who has minimal military might — staying in power?

 On TV, they talk of rebuilding Iraq. After we destroy it. Great. Our schools are for shit, people don't have medical coverage, and our money will go to rebuild Iraq.

As Brian Swimme, my big-picture person, talks about, there are threshold moments in evolution where things could have gone o­ne way or the other — sometimes they have gone to doom and extinction rather than to flowering in more abundance. This is the threshold we are o­n. This war is like taunting the devil. Who in their right mind would put us here? It is not, however, a simplistic argument between war and peace, which peaceful people have a tendency to get somewhat lost in. “No war” has to go along with a complex alternative. But that is indeed what sane people need to be dealing with.

I would like someone who really knows that war is best to make more sense of this than that Hussein is a monster who kills his own people and invades his neighbors (we helped with both, to make matters more absurd). So what? How does that translate to an immediate threat to an unstable world that's vulnerable to attack by an aggressor that already got us? An army against terrorists was bizarre enough — now an army against a sleeping giant is beyond belief.

Thanks to David Langer for sending this…

An Illegal and Immoral War Arab News Editorial, 3/18/03

When American Secretary of State Colin Powell stated yesterday that the Security Council had failed to pass a test set by the United States, a new Gulf War became inevitable.

On this darkening day, I got some relief from the sense that we are in an asylum for the criminally insane from this Howard Fineman Newsweek piece, that I picked up in Wade Frazier's Linksletter #4 . (If you want a fast pass through EVERYTHING being said o­n the progressive front, Wade's Linksletters, that we are linking to from our homepage, are astonishing.) Wade says, “Waiting for War—In White House: Blame Game to Start Soon is from o­ne of Bush's greatest apologists. His faith is waning.” Here's how this informative Fineman piece, reprinted in Truthout, begins.

Editor's Note: It is odd indeed to find Howard Fineman in the pages of Truthout. Mr. Fineman has been, for some time, a Bush apologist of the first rank. Perhaps, however, his faith has begun to slip. Read the essay below with care, and understand from whom it has come.

I’m waiting for war to break out—not in Iraq, but in the Bush administration. I’m wondering what’s going through Colin Powell’s mind. The secretary of State is looking pretty grim these days, like a man going through the motions. Might he bail out after a not-too-distant decent interval? Friends say no, he’s a team player. “But he’s not a happy camper,” o­ne admits.

In the meantime, who’s going to be blamed for the Turkey screw-up, or the U.N. screwups? Who’s going to leak the authoritative—and explosive—estimates of the true cost of maintaining 100,000 troops in Iraq for the indefinite future? (One general already has been whacked for piping up, but there will be others.) Who’s going to take the fall for the fact that we’ve lost the international moral high ground? The world is blaming the president, of course, but that’s not the way things work here. Someone else goes down. Who? The “neocons”? Donald Rumsfeld? The State Department? Dick Cheney? Condi Rice?

Maybe everything will go so swimmingly in Iraq that it’ll be o­ne big happy family here at home. Maybe the war will last o­nly a few days and Iraqis will be in the streets, joyfully greeting GIs as liberators. Maybe a world that now sees us as an imperial pariah will suddenly acknowledge the wisdom of our ways. But never has so much blood, treasure and destiny been gambled o­n the hope that folks will smile at us. It’s the War of the Happy Iraqis.

And here's Fineman's glimmer-of-hope ending:

The key now is Powell. He could unhinge the Bush administration in a New York minute. He’s never been fully trusted by the Bush innermost circle. He wasn’t among the group of advisers who briefed Bush in Austin as he prepared for a presidential campaign in 1999. More important, Powell has too much of an independent political (and media) base to suit the president. Bush values loyalty above all, and he likes to dominate the room. He doesn’t like knowing that o­ne critical word from Powell could cause chaos in Washington.

Is there o­ne, and will we hear it?

The esoteric map of evolution posits that humanity still needs wars to develop itself — for humans to be in full flower as a loving and compassionate species, we need great shocks to wrench us from lesser positions. But, is some worst-case scenario what will have to happen to get humanity over a blindness where war is an ordinary resort?

I think what makes me most incredulous about our warpath is the inattention to the fact that an Iraqi life is as valuable as an American o­ne. It is contemptible not to think this way. How can Bush-the-Christian consider Iraqi lives collateral damage, to be calculated as some objective unit of information, and not as people who are as precious as Americans? Would o­ne side here in America ever open fire o­n another side — like the Democrats against the Republicans, even for the humanitarian reason of stopping aggression? As contemporary philosopher, David Spangler, says, “All war is civil war, and we all suffer and lose.”

I've been concentrating in my posts more o­n what to do to get us out of our situation than o­n passing along pieces about the nightmare we are in, but I want to keep some track going where I'm mirroring what is. And, given I'm putting up few posts in this category, I want each one to be particularly telling. So it is with this transcript of Morning Edition, March 12 o­n NPR, Possible Worst-Case Scenarios if War with Iraq Occurs,  sent to me by Maireid Sullivan. The speaker is Retired Colonel Mike Turner, General Schwarzkopf's personal briefing officer during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm.

Here's an excerpt:

Perhaps we can pull this off, but here's a far worse scenario that's at least as likely. Within hours of our attack, Saddam launches Scuds o­n Israel. Israel's right-wing government launches a full-scale attack o­n Iraq, creating a holy war nightmare. Saddam, threatened with his own survival, uses chemical and biological weapons and human shields just as he has in the past. He torches his own oil fields, thousands of his own people are killed. Photos of American soldiers amid landscapes of Iraqi civilian bodies blanket the world press which aligns unanimously against the US. The US is condemned by NATO and the UN.

The war ends within a few weeks, but the crisis deepens. The US is left to administer a political vacuum in Iraq. Iran is emboldened to help the Shiites in the south. Disease breaks out, food and water are contaminated and the cost of the war skyrockets. The US economy is dealt a body blow, but the administration can find no credible way out. Britain's Prime Minister Blair is voted out of office.

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda, seeing an opportunity due to a shift in US focus, attacks a major US target. North Korea, emboldened by the distraction, ignores diplomatic efforts to restrain its development of nuclear weapons and begins to export weapons-grade plutonium to terrorists.

These are not remote possibilities, but in my view reasonable, possibly even likely outcomes.