Just some thoughts on what has been a rather disappointing and hard day.

One, Last night's game made me sick. I, and every other red blooded American, hate the Lakers. Duncan's shot was so miraculous that it just seemed likeome preordained moment for this Spurs team to find their destiny. The one thing that really bothered me about it, however, and this has been an NBA rule for some time, so it wasn't just a one time thing, but why is it that teams get to take the ball out of bounds at half-court following a late time out? Shouldn't the team that just scored be rewarded by forcing the other team to go 94 feet to make a shot, rather than cutting that by almost 2/3?

Second,
John Sellers did a great job of articulating the moral outrage that I know a lot of people feel about the Abu Gharib prison story. Let me take a step back for a second, however. The administration , and that includes everyone from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to the lowliest neoconservative policy wonk at the Pentagon or at Foggy Bottom, has consistently been wrong about every single major assumption about post war Iraq. First, and most famously, the thought that we would be treated as liberators, like, as Paul Wolfowitz said, "Paris in 1944". We haven't been. We have ousted Saddam, true, but we then installed our own government of Iraqis (the Governing Council) that had no legitimacy or authority. L.Paul Bremer is the authority. Second, that Iraq's reconstruction would be self-financed. Obviously, this has been so wrong its silly. The oil plants in Iraq have done nothing to lower prices here, nor have they provided an iota of support for reconstruction efforts there. Third, that Ahmed Chalabi, the man the CIA, NSA and every neocon on earth had been using as their buttress against the claims made by Scott Ritter and Hans Blix about WMD's, and most sane intelligence analysis by our allies, would be seen as legitimate by the Iraqi people, and that we would be able to hand over the rule of the country over to him, and the Iraqi army and police force, soon after toppling Saddam. This has been a horrific failure, and Chalabi himself has been cizying up to the Shiites in recent weeks, not especially aiding the cause of builing a United Iraq. Fifth, that the war in Iraq and the war on terror were tied, so that defeating Saddam would cut off an important resource to Al Qaeda. This was an argument made by people in my IR class a year and a half ago, read Hopple and Sarah Priebe, and it is so stupid because it ignores all logic. Al Qaeda is a fundamentalist Islamisist organization. Saddam was a SECULAR head of a party that was Leninist in a lot of its beliefs. They were not tied together. And we have simply, thru the occupation and now the prison photos, created a new generation of terrorists who see us as imperialist and decadent, waiting to fall to a righteous wind of suicide and large scale terror attacks. I could list dozens more. It appears however that there are really only three options for a future Iraq, and by future I mean post US/Coalition occupation.

1. Iraq becomes a theocratic state like Iran, led by the Shiite majority. Obviously this is the last thing we want, especially with regard to the safety of Israel.

2. A Balkanized Iraq featuring three states divided by religion and ethnicity, the Kurds in the north, the Sunni's in the center, and the Shiites in the south. This isn't going to work either. Neither Turkey, a member of NATO, or Iran would want to see an independent Kurdish state that might be a security threat to them. The Saudi's would fear a Shiite presence on their Northern border, that might simply act as the puppet of Iran, their coreligous neighbor. And the Suuni's would be caught in the middle, and would not be happy about it.

3. The most likely scenario, and the one floating around now, creating a "united" Iraq, with each group listed above having basic autonomy to self govern. The Kurds have had this for a while, because of the no-fly-zone. However, keeping such a state legitimate, as well as guarding against Sunni or Shiite takeover may be difficult.

These are not perfect solutions, but we cannot go as we are now, and we cannot pull out now either. We are stuck for the long haul. Our best hope is that JFK gets elected and makes it a more multilateral, and Arab, coalition.

Good luck digesting all that.

John's performance is at 1130 AM Sunday, so that should be fun, and we'll probably go see Troy, otherwise known as the beautiful people movie, afterwards.

Have a good weekend all of you, be safe, and be good to yourselves