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From UPI:
A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill [.....]"
The full text is available here.
Update: an entry on another ex-peace-activist ( "Astonishing Article by Ex-Peace-Activist" ) is here.
Senator Tom Daschle has famously said “I’m saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we’re now forced to war.”
The goal of Bush administration diplomacy was to line up support for a war. The notion that the failure of this diplomacy resulted in a war, appears to be a contradiction in terms.
There appears to be a possibility that France’s position on Iraq may result from a wish to lead the European Union.
Per Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post:
America goes courting Guinea, Cameroon and Angola in search of the nine Security Council votes necessary to pass our new resolution on Iraq…..for unfathomable reasons it matters to many, both at home and around the world, that the United States should have the permission of Guinea to risk the lives of American soldiers to rid the world—and the long-suffering Iraqi people—of a particularly vicious and dangerous tyrant.It is only slightly less absurd that we should require the assent of France.
[.....]
France is not doing this to contain Iraq—France spent the entire 1990s weakening sanctions and eviscerating the inspections regime as a way to end the containment of Iraq. France is doing this to contain the United States. As I wrote last week, France sees the opportunity to position itself as the leader of a bloc of former great powers challenging American supremacy.
That is a serious challenge. It requires a serious response. We need to demonstrate that there is a price to be paid for undermining the United States on a matter of supreme national interest.
First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council—with India and Japan as new permanent members—to dilute France’s disproportionate and anachronistic influence.
Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us.
Third, we should begin laying the foundation for a new alliance to replace the now obsolete Cold War alliances. Its nucleus should be the “coalition of the willing” now forming around us. No need to abolish NATO. The grotesque performance of France, Germany and Belgium in blocking aid to Turkey marks the end of NATO’s useful life. Like the United Nations, it will simply wither of its own irrelevance.
Thanks to David Melle’s factsofisrael Weblog for pointing this article out. The full text of the article is found here.
Of course war is wrong. But if permitted to continue, Hussein is likely to build nukes and give them to terrorists, who will nuke us. No one says he’s unlikely to do that. We can’t permit that to happen.
Winston S. Churchill, the grandson of Winston Churchill, wrote in the The Wall Street Journal:
My grandfather’s resolve and leadership offer a second parallel to today’s situation—one that confronted the world 55 years ago, when America was on the point of losing her monopoly of the atomic bomb. As leader of the opposition in the British parliament, Churchill was gravely alarmed at the prospect of the Soviet Union acquiring atomic, and eventually nuclear, weapons of its own. He said at the time, “What will happen when they get the atomic bomb themselves and have accumulated a large store? No one in his senses can believe that we have a limitless period of time before us.”
As President Bush and Mr. Blair intend today in the case of Iraq, Winston Churchill in 1948 favored the threat and—if need be the reality—of a pre-emptive strike to safeguard the interests of the Free World. Aware of the dangers ahead, Churchill believed that the U.S.—while it still had a monopoly of atomic power—should require the Soviet Union to abandon the development of these weapons, if need be by threatening their use.
The Truman administration chose not to heed his advice. The result was the Cold War, in the course of which the world—on more than one occasion—came perilously close to a nuclear holocaust.
It is no great surprise that the nations which long toiled under the yoke of communism during the Cold War are our greatest supporters today.
Many have said that the war will create terrorists. But as Churchill says in this article, those we have freed from tyranny in the past, have become our friends and allies. By freeing the Iraqi people from a dictator who everyone agrees is a murderous tyrant, we may earn the friendship of millions, and a powerful ally.
The importance of entertainment is famously increased during wartime. The Matrix anime trailer is here.
Scrappleface lets you send an encouraging word to our troops here.
Deane Barker posted one of the best jokes I’ve heard in quite a while here.
Okay, here’s something someone ought to do. Be the Matt Drudge of the Blogosphere. Assemble on one weblog every day the five or ten best blog entries he or she can find.
It would be a great website – it would get a lot of traffic – and it would be a real service to the Blogworld, by drawing attention to the best links.
I just did a Google search on “Best Weblog”, and nothing like this came up. There are some awards and prizes, but no one appears to be doing what Drudge does, where he seeks out and posts the best permalinks he can find each day.
So if you’re reading this – it could be you. 
A lot of people are concerned about the rush to reality programming. Why is reality programming so popular at the moment? Does anybody like seeing people eat bugs, for example?
Part of it is that the dramas are too much alike. People are getting driven away from scripted TV because most of the dramas on TV are cop shows. There is some variety. We have both kinds of cop shows: mostly forensic and partly forensic .
People want new stuff.
