I'm with Blair & Bush on this one. There should be a new standard of governance in the world so that terrorism & WMDs are outlawed. Saddam Hussein, the dictator, has flouted agreements regarding same. Police action is justified. There will be tragedy & comedy & the limitations of cultural myopia & of military force alone will become obvious. But it is time for Saddam & his torture-repression mafia to go.

However, the US must learn that achieving this new standard of governance will take more than "security actions". We ought to confront our own complicity in the global production & sale of the weapons of war & mass death.

(& nevertheless I wrote a pretty good anti-war poem, if I do say so myself (see blog entry for 3/12). What does this say about poetry, if anything? This poem is a simple statement of empathy with anyone, civilian or soldier, caught in the middle. Maybe the lesson here is the moral ambiguity of "simple statements".)