If one follows the war news — and I'm not suggesting one should do this — one can get whiplash over reports that keep screeching to a sudden halt. Saddam is dead. Whoops, no — he's alive. But now he's definitely dead. Or maybe he isn't. No, he's definitely been dead for several days, plus we just killed him again. This guy's been written off for dead more times than Tom Arnold.
The same thing seems to be occurring with the finding (or not) of so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction. Our troops keep coming across stashes of what are definitely, absolutely supplies for deadly chemical warfare…until such time as they turn out to be cans of Raid or whatever.
I've stopped watching. I'm just assuming that any day now, Saddam will be dead with some finality, and we'll find something that will justify all the claims that Hussein had something really nasty that he was about to unleash on us. It's like those cops who used to say, "If I search you for possession of marijuana, I'm going to find marijuana on you — whether it's there or not."
I still have no firm feelings as to whether this war was a good idea, and I'm skeptical of folks who seem to have made up their minds, one way or the other, based on what they want to see happen to George W. Bush's domestic policies. Clearly, there are those who are vocal on both sides of the issue who couldn't care less about the liberation of the people of Iraq. They're hoping a victory there will boost Bush's political stock and allow him to cut more taxes, install more conservative judges, restrict abortion rights, etc. Or they want to see him fall on his ass so he'll be weakened and easier to defeat in the next election. The latter group has the more difficult position to hold, since a failure in Iraq could mean a lot of dead and maimed Americans.
Frankly, I think the final verdict on whether it was right and proper to invade Iraq won't be in for years. We'll have to see the final costs, both in terms of lives and dollars. We'll have to see what kind of reprisals, if any, result. And most of all, we'll have to see what becomes of Iraq. If it winds up with a government as repressive as Saddam's, then the war will probably have been a colossal blunder. If it leads to more democracy and liberation, then great.
This seems to me the most logical way to view the situation, but I don't see any pundits or politicians who want to wait. They're all too eager to see what the war is going to do for American politics. If it does what they want to Bush's approval rating, then they'll be glad we invaded.