Peace on.
Sheila Lennon: I'm dropping out of the war. She expands —
Pro-war and anti-war blogs are two sides of the same coin. War and anti-war fight each other with hearts and minds and furious typing.
On the streets, anger fuels protest, and is met with anger.
The potential for tearing our country apart again is already shaping up: "Support the war, support the troops" vs. "Support the troops -- Bring them home."
Spammers want to sell me a flag....
I'm dropping out of the war. I don't want war in my living room any more. I don't want to give it my attention. I can't stop it, can't change it, won't fight it. All I can do is live as peacefully as I can, without sucking in its virtual fumes.
Christopher Lydon: A War to End War? The gist:
...The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh observed in a long interview yesterday for our radio program (www.thewholewideworld.net) that the war will punctuate the end of the 300-year history of the Anglophone Empire. See also his piece in the current New Yorker.
Into the confusion I throw out the perhaps insanely cheerful thought that this could be the war to end war. Meaning that the neo-con adventurers have decisively lost the world's vote on the war and will lose the peace, no matter how long or brutal the battle of Baghdad. More particularly: that the sole superpower has met its adversary for the future in the stubborn, unintimidated, and close to universal peace movement that has found its medium on the Web.
The question, paraphrasing Stalin on the Pope, is: how many divisions has the Internet? More and more every day clearly. The most provocative elaboration of the answer comes from our colleague Jim Moore of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. Meet "the second superpower."
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jmoore/secondsuperpower.htm
I tend to agree with both of them.
On the one hand, I'm weary of wall-to-wall war on every other medium, and don't want it around here too, much as I been contributing to it myself.
On the other hand, I think the blogosphere, on the whole, is doing a good job of fact-checking and -sharing; and of creating, finding and linking to some terrific thinking on the whole war subject.
A reader points here and asks,
...do you really believe the best thing for the World would be for the US to pull out now and leave one of the cruelest dictorships in modern times at the helm in Iraq, with all the cruel and innocent deaths that would follow in the wake of such a move.
No, I don't. Now that we're in there, I want us to finish with minimal loss of life on all sides. I hope we take out Saddam Hussein's regime and return the country to its oppressed people. Then I hope we go home.
But I don't have much faith that either will happen. This looks like Vietnam to me, only worse. I hope and pray that I'm wrong. And that Chris Lydon and Jim Moore are right about the peace movement. Hate to say I have my doubts about that too.
It's a big fucking mess. There are no easy answers. Not that I can see, anyway. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
6:26:53 AM 
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