Why There's No Strategy to End This War

My local town of Eureka in northwest California had a pretty good peace rally on March 18, to mark the third anniversary of the US attack on Iraq. They've put them on every year, including a big one just before the war started. An ad hoc local group called Communities for Peace worked for eight weeks and, with the help of Veterans for Peace, pulled 2,000 people into the municipal auditorium on F Street. There were plenty of young people, and the crowd sat a bit restlessly through three speeches before hitting the streets. There were four marching bands.

They headed down to the square in Old Town, next to the rehabbed waterfront, where I was the designated final speaker. I cheered them all up by telling them no one present should ever look in the mirror and tell themselves they're not smart enough to run the country. The country is being run by morons.

I read out some of the more spectacular moron predictions from 2003, finishing up with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, "We're all neocons now," and Vanity Fair's answer to Clausewitz, Christopher Hitchens: "This will be no war--there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.... The president will give an order. [The attack] will be rapid, accurate and dazzling.... It will be greeted by the majority of the Iraqi people as an emancipation. And I say, bring it on."

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