I was considering not writing on Iraq at all anymore, since there were so many people writing about it. Then, I thought, there aren’t very many of me’s writing this.

I was wrong about diplomatic options — not all of them were exhausted. However, I do believe that they were completely ineffective. One reason is that the weapons inspectors weren’t getting far enough. They were making some progress, but I hardly considered it to be working. It seemed obvious that Saddam was just buying time. I wonder how many weapons will be found through war that couldn’t be found through peace…. Yet, another reason was that Bush didn’t care what the UN thought. He wanted world legitimacy, but from the start, we knew that the US could attack anyway, without the UN. And now, the UN is really showing how useful it is.

Half of me is for the war, and half of me isn’t. I want Saddam to go down. I want the Iraqi people “liberated.” However, dangerous precedents are being set by this war. In a specific sense, I support it, but when I look at the broader ramifications, it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. I already mentioned pre-emptive war. Another would be the fate of the UN. How can the UN remain relevant when it seems that any country with enough power can go to war if it wants? Then again, was the UN ever so useful in the first place? It seemed like a dog that had no teeth.

What if Saddam uses biological or chemical weapons? That could have far-reaching effects, especially on how war is waged in the future. Could we drop a nuke in retaliation, as we threatened in Gulf War I? What kind of precedent would that set?

I’m betting the war will be mostly over by the end of this month, but it’s not just about the war. We still have to rebuild afterwards. So, even if the war is short-lived, the effects of it will still carry on. Especially in the economic area. We’ll be paying for it years later. The occupying forces will become targets for terrorists. I’m really worried that we won’t be able to rebuild at all. The American public has a short attention span (something I’ll bring up time and time again) and support could be cut off short, leaving it up to warring factions to decide who rules and how. *shudder*

How sickening the news is… the same repeated headlines repeatedly repeated, on every single station. Oh, but don’t forget the special headline with the special music to accompany it. Sometimes I get the feeling that it’s all been planned out from the beginning. The first strikes were to boost ratings for Bush’s speech. Saddam’s speech so many could debate on whether he was really dead or not. The scuds that actually turned out to be frogs — that’s to stimulate debate between conservatives and liberals. I’m glad for the news blackout, though. Intelligence needs to be protected. We don’t want Saddam and his cronies to learn of our troop movements from CNN, like they did last time.

I’m not going to talk about Iraq again until something drastic happens, or an interesting conversation occurs between another person and me. I’ve got other interesting topics lined up, and I don’t won’t Iraq to hog up all my talking space.