Back to this war thing for a minute
I overheard somebody say something along the lines of, "You need to remember how you felt on September 11. When you remember that feeling, you know why we need to go to war with Iraq." I'm sorry, but that feels to me more like, "Well, hell, we got to bomb somebody," and finding a bomb-ee 1/on which we can pin some sort of past trangression and 2/will be less likely to be capable of something awful in retaliation.

My guess is that's why we'd pick Iraq and not North Korea.

I think a war with Iraq would go on until the exact moment at which we got bored with it. That's one we could switch off at will, just like we did in '91. I don't think the North Koreans would let us off that easy.

Intellectually, I can understand elements of the case for a war with Iraq and for a war with North Korea. But tying either to Sept. 11 is pretty cheap. I went back over the nationalities of those 19 hijackers, and I didn't turn up one Iraqi or North Korean. I did, however, find a bunch of Saudi Arabians. Last I checked, we thought Saudi Arabia was on our side.

Well, hell, we got to bomb somebody.

I always hoped the world was a little more complicated than that.