[Good ol’ George W. looks pretty good on this side of 2016.]

I have a problem: I believe–deep down in the heart of me, now–that war is not a viable solution for two countries that are having trouble getting along. Granted, some Neanderthal leads his bloodthirsty conquering wannabes into your place, you are forced to act. You have to do something, and the most immediate something that leaps to mind is to defend your country with force. 

Cool. I’m down with that, really I am. As a matter of fact, if the airplanes used in the attacks on September 11 had Saddam’s fingerprints on them, I might even be persuaded to drop the doggone bombs myself. I mean, I’m all for peace. If they determine that some dude is threatening our country and/or its people, however, then the stakes have gone up, and the game is totally different. In that case, we either need to act in a forceful way, or we need to at least shut down the borders so no one can get in without a legitimate reason to be here. As I am told that the latter is “no response in a business-driven economy,” it seems that at that point one is forced to open up the proverbial can of Whuppass®. I’ll go along with it, although I’m not going to be happy about doing the whole commando-thing.

My problem is that I haven’t been able to see any of the proof of what our government used as their justification to head into Iraq. No one has. Saddam has weapons of mass destruction (a phrase I believe we Americans must have coined after we used a couple of them). Iraq is part of an Axis of Evil, which includes Iran and North Korea. My daddy says that Saddam is a liar and an evil dictator. Well, we’ve seen no proof so far of the first, there is no obvious link (that we’ve been allowed to see) to prove the 2nd, and the 3rd sorta stands there on its own, making us all wonder about the sanity of our Commander in Chief. 

(Just for the record, I am personally no longer in the “wondering” camp; he’s nuts, or plain dumb. But I digress.)

I don’t want this to sound like any kind of diatribe against the Bush administration. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a fan. But there have been a number of evils perpetrated in the name of maintaining the peace or protecting our interests, by an ever-increasing group of nations. (The whole Falklands deal comes to mind, as does the U.S.S.R. invading Afghanistan; I’m certain the Russkies regret opening up that can of worms to this day. And how about the Big Daddy of them all: Vietnam. It seems France has excised all mention of that country from their language.)

At any rate, it just seems smarter to try and utilize all of the different levels of diplomacy before sending in the troops. Why get people killed unless it becomes absolutely necessary? Instead, it has become the solution du jour in times of disagreement. Truly, whatever happened to talking it out? It worked when we were kids (usually), and many, many battles were avoided because some brave soul took a scary step forward and said, “I’m sorry, Jimmy, I didn’t mean to rip the eyes out of your newt.” We all knew that was exactly what he did want to do, but he seemed genuinely contrite, so, yes, we all bought it. Why? Because we didn’t really want to fight about it. We didn’t want a blind newt, but we really just wanted to get back to playing tag or whatever; besides, those things could grow whole new tails, so who’s to say they couldn’t come up with a couple of new eyes, too? So Jimmy put his eyeless amphibian in a cardboard box, and we all ran back to the house they were building down the street to play in the newly-dug basement. Talk about a war-zone. 

The point is, we worked it out without coming to blows. We collectively decided upon a realistic approach to maintaining the peace, and we came to a peaceful decision to just get along, blind newt notwithstanding. (We’ll call this newt “Collateral Damage.”)

So now we come to the Blind-Newt-in-Chief (no, not Gingrich), and the whole endless miasma of the war in Iraq. How do we exit? Do we set a hard time-line for withdrawal of our forces? Now that we’ve ripped the eyes out of this newt, how do we resolve the issue?

How about we just start by insisting that they saying they’re sorry? Because, you know, once someone says that they’re sorry, then the whole situation looks a lot different. Maybe we could put the amphibian back in the box, and start over.

Hey, it’s just an idea. But isn’t that how a lot of good things start?