Then again, there are the protestors. According to Bagge, a large portion of the protestors he has seen were busy grinding their own axes. Mike Wolf has given some anecdotal evidence testifying to this. Wossname !!! mentioned that the last large round of protests before Sunday’s was in large part organized by the IWW—the freaking Wobblies! I thought they had gone under in the fifties. Bastards should have gone down in the nineties.

But then again, a lot of poets are against the war. Of course, one of them is Robert Bly, but then again, one of them is Kunitz, and another is Dove.

However, as a Filipino, I have seen the chaos in a country run by a dictator that America tolerates for reasons of policy. Reading the letter to the Guardian below, I feel some unease.

But this is a matter of war. Why exactly did Bush plan for this immediately after 11 September, according to Woodward? Will we be crying for his blood some years from now, accusing him of having enough information on Iraq to know that attacks on the World Trade Center were imminent, the way that Roosevelt is often hounded?

And then there is Saddam Hussein.

I have not seen a rush to war. I think that the case has been built slowly, surely. Nor have I seen a unilateralism—despite all its talk of being willing to go it alone, the administration has been very delicate with the UN. I believe Bush has the goods on Saddam Hussein; I think the Powell presentation is only a small outcropping of an iceberg; I think that the intelligence assets compromised in doing so were the least valuable, but I’m sure dozens of people were killed for having allowed such leaks to have taken place, whether guilty or no. Is this war about oil? I do not think so, though it seems that the French and Germans seem to think so.

Should this war not continue, how ought I to fight against Saddam Hussein? Rice asked something like this of the protestors. How do I support the Iraqi resistance? Are there gunrunning missions to resistance cells in Iraq? to the Kurds? (I really hope America is not planning on using Turkey as an exit strategy. Much as I enjoyed the desolate plains of Anatolia and the Toro mountains and haggling in the Great Bazaar, the Turks have had massive genocidal purges of Armenian and Kurdish populations within its borders in the twentieth century. If one takes a far enough perspective, when they started pouring through the gates of Constantinopolis and flooding into the Balkans towards Austria and Germany, destroying the Roman Empire, the Turks set into motion the Great War five hundred years later, which in turn set into motion World War II; they also set up the conflicts that plague—in some cases genocidally—the Balkans today.) As a natural law man, should I be helping people resist authority? But that presumes that Hussein is a legitimate authority. Do I believe that he is? Feh.

According to Priest’s alternate history (or so I have read), Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy could have resulted in Hitler being toppled. Do I believe this? Despite sanctions on Iraq, Hussein has remained in power. Despite popular opposition, he still flourishes. Despite neighbors who hate him, he continues.
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