Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution)
However, it's clear that Dubya wants a war for purposes not related to weapons containment; indeed, his administration is utterly disinterested in that aspect of the Iraq problem, except as a convenient trope to sell the war to inattentive voters. Dubya wants regime change, and I can sympathize. Saddam has been in power a decade longer than he should have been, and I can think of worse uses of the American military than clearing out bad governments around the world. If Dubya said something along the lines of "First we get rid of Saddam, and then we're going to pay a call to Robert Mugabe," well, that's a barricade that I'd be inclined to rush.
Scalzi makes it clear in the entry that he doesn't think Bush is primarily interested in removing bad governements around the world and I think he is right about that point. What Bush and company appear to want do, however, is have the U.S. military take out governments that the U.S. government does not like under the guise of removing bad governments, threats to "world peace" -as if that has existed in recorded history- or whatever else they can foist upon a gullible public in the U.S. and the broader world.
This is an empire and those who want to see America defeated are right to feel that way. Their alternatives might be worse than the current situation but that doesn't mean that the current situation is just and should not be changed. posted by micah holmquist at 10/12/2002 01:30:00 AM
