It's On

Looking at real post #1 I realised it was way too poignant. This no time for poignancy.

Noon Aussie-time that sick-joke, draft-dodging, born-with-a-silver-spoon-up-his-nose, Oh-Dad-won't-you-buy-me-my-own-baseball-team, dead-eyed automaton the American people didn't elect President gave Saddam Hussein "and his sons" ("This man tried to kill m'pa!" What is this? A Sicilian feud?) forty-eight hours to get out of Iraq, or every other Iraqi's gonna pay. And I always thought Reagan was the one who couldn't tell the difference between real life and a Hollywood movie. For this result, the world's most powerful dumbass has happily pissed away international law and the diplomatic structures that kept the second half of the Twentieth Century from looking like the first half (well, if you were European). No more pretense, we're an Empire, we do what we bloody like.

And apart from everything else, he's left the rest of us in the invidious position of hoping everything we know about what's likely to happen next is wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm going to have to spend the next month praying I'll end up looking like an idiot. Sure, it's worth it: better to be taunted by I-told-you-so's from gloating war-mongering pinheads than to watch thousands die, and the world go all to Hell. That doesn't mean I have to like it. Of course, whatever happens they'll tell us how right they were - look at the way these wingnuts extol the miracle of Afghanistan, now the Sweden of Central Asia, because we cared so much.

But George Senior's little sapling is the Seppos' leader (insert bus-sized qualifiers here) and they can hate him. I have other fish to fry. Our glorious leader John Howard has just announced that, yes, those Australian soldiers in the Gulf for the last three months aren't just there for a tan, we will be going to war. What a relief - the tension was killing me. This despite massive opposition (and, my American friends, I mean three-quarters of the population against war without UN sanction, 40% against war under any circumstances) illustrated with street protests dwarfing anything seen since the Sixties. Dubya has the support of most of his people (so CNN says, at any rate, and why would we doubt them?). Howard does not - so the coffin into which he has happily driven the last nail contains not only international law, but Australian democracy and the idea that peacefully petitioning your government has any kind of point. When the NON-peaceful protests start, I hope he remembers that.