On the day of Resident Bush's photo-op of all phot-ops with that weird staged plane landing onto the aircraft carrier, he gave a speech to update us on the war against Iraq. I was listening to his speech on the radio in my car and was struck by one particular section in which he said:

Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.

I do suppose this is true...our weapons have gotten more precise, the numbers killed significantly smaller than in wars past. But this seems like a strange instance to make this claim. I mean, we killed thousands of Iraqi civilians in our one-sided war against Iraq and more than 100 US military servicepeople were killed. And then we distributed a deck of cards with the faces of 55 "Most Wanted" Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party on them, hoping we would find them and "bring them to justice." So far I think we have found 20 or so of the men (and woman) on the cards. Alive. And then today there is an audiotape of what seems to be Saddam Hussein's voice. Alive. And his son stole something like $1 billion from the central bank (In US currency).

So explain to me the moral advance in this case - Saddam and the rest of the deck of cards seem to be alive and kicking, possible even regrouping. Innocent civilians can barely get water in their towns, medical help, food.

The current U.S. regime has got to go. I don't want to have to wait until 2004!