starting civil wars

Today's New York Times reports that Bush was so determined to go to war in Iraq in early 2003 that he even proposed sparking a confrontation by painting "a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein."
Not a big surprise: anybody paying even moderate attention to diplomatic signals being sent publicly from early 2002 could see that the US Administration was doing everything it could to discredit the possibility that UN inspections could work (and in so doing, made it less likely that Iraq would cooperate in the first place). But that's over and done with now. Now, with the major ethnic groups fighting one another more and more brutally, it's clear that the war we did go into was - hmm, how do I put this? - not very well thought out. We're now on the brink of civil war.

So what do we do? I think a lot of anti-war people in the US have it wrong when they want to pull the troops out immediately - we may not like having our troops occupying Iraq but seen internationally, it would be completely irresponsible of us to pull out now, leaving a huge mess we helped to create.

In the long-term, we have to ask ourself what we want our government to care about most in the Middle East: 1) democracy as each country's voters decide it, 2) our special brand of secular (at least, non-islamistic) liberal democracy or 3) secure oil reserves. Even when I was living in France (and you know most of the French think) I have always doubted very much that our government really put #3 ahead of #1 or #2, no matter how misguided and arrogant their policies are. But more and more I'm convinced that the old boys club of oilmen that have enormous influence in the current Administration just can't ever get it out of their system. I've been convinced Bush is a disaster for a long time, and a dangerous one, but now we've got to start doing something about it - the next election is only 2 years away.