The strange sense of a world gone mad, but not in the way most poets & bloggers see it. . .

It's hard to read the present reality, the moral course is not obvious. The only sure thing is that innocent victims will die and soldiers' families will mourn. The world is once again subject to Chance & War.

I spoke bluntly in post of yesterday, supporting Blair & Bush, partly out of perverse desire to affront the anti-war poets.

The war motives are murky; the aggression is plain; the conspiracy theories are everywhere (Cheney, oil, Vietnam-era warmongering, US hegemonic ambitions). But the anti-war factions suppress two elements: 1) the world's prior complicity with both Saddam tyranny and sanctions suffering; 2) the fact that the Bush War on Terror is, in part, a PROTEST against the conditions which allowed 9/11 to happen, and a global effort to change those conditions.

I have written repeatedly here that war & violence will not really improve those conditions. But the reality of the Saddam/Ba'ath regime in Iraq has been a prior & present condition of CHRONIC WAR & VIOLENCE. This in itself changes the moral implications of the UN sanctions impasse, as well as the US decision to enforce Iraq's disarmament.

We will see, perhaps quite soon, whether Saddam was telling the truth to the UN or not.