More disjointed thoughts about the world crisis.

Consensus coming apart. The US has a strategy of global "peacekeeping" which involves pre-emptive military attacks on other nations. The rest of the world repudiates this more strongly every day, which increasingly isolates the US. Asymmetry of perspectives.

The strange shadow-symmetry between Bush & bin Laden. Oil boys who need each other's aggression to justify their own. Useful to each other. We go to war (against the wrong guy) & get color-coded threat warnings.

Yet still I can hear the weird optimism coming from the hawk planners : bringing down Saddam will make things better, safer. We will liberate Iraq. & strangest of all (to me) - I'm not yet ready to deny they might be at least partially right!!

I hear what Jordan & Anastasios & so many everywhere are saying - about the consequences, the pure immorality of aggressive war, the ordinary people who will suffer & die for the sake of these "plans". But then I also think of the Marsh Arabs, the Kurds, the people in Iraqi prisons & torture cells - the people who have been suffering from Saddam's killer regime since he installed it (via murder of his associates) decades ago. & of the nature of the Saddam regime : its sick focus on torture, repression, experimentation with WMDs. . .

So I am still not the one with the firm voice to say NO to Bush; not the one with the clear vision of a post-militarist world in balance. Have I lost my own morality? Am I become a "good German"? These are the thoughts that oppress me.