To Be Expected

The Guardian is reporting that Sadaam (Sadaam, hell, EVERYBODY!) is getting a six-week war reprieve. This doesn't surprise me at all; in fact, it would've surprised me far more had the Lone Ranger won out over the Dirty Dozen, what with the problem of European popular dissent being unfazed by the UN report on Monday.

I try very hard to be as level-headed as possible about the possibility of war. While I really enjoy the vociferous anti-war stances taken by others, indeed, I often can't help but to link to many of them, I myself cannot make the decisive leap they obviously have. I'm left at the edge, watching them hoot and holler, admiring them, and sometimes even longing to be over there, hooting my best hoot and hollering my most feral of hollers. In my more desperate moments, when I look over my shoulder in consideration of the unconsiderable and see, in the dim, distant void, the stollid, sometimes gleeful, acceptance of war by the mass of conservatives, I find that I cannot, that I have no desire to, join them either. So, I wait, having decided upon momentary indecision, resisting the urge to jump into the mist, to lower the knife on the President and the presidency that I trust less and fear more than the God I've been raised to (nominally) believe. I have decided, for now, for this instant, if for no other, that I must still have hope, even if it's only that, which is one of the furthest things, sometimes, from belief, that the White House is just playing hardball politics with their rhetoric, that there is some kind of method to their madness -- a la, the good cop / bad cop routine we see in the movies. At the same time, I know things are never this simple in such matters, and that there are so many voices and pudgy hands vying for their disparate interests. In the end, I'm left with a dim hope that somebody, somewhere has a coherent plan -- even if that's not the intention of the "planners"! -- in the face of the antimonious welter that marks contemporary foreign policy.