very disturbing

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25138-2004Apr19.html

Games Night

For those of my friends that are not yet part of the Great No-Wing Gaming Conspiracy...

I won't be able to make it for a few more weeks, but it's fun and full of interesting people.

well, that's one way to look at it

from the Post's excerpt of Woodward's latest

Wolfowitz, who had been convinced years ago of Iraq's complicity in anti-American terrorism, thought Libby presented a strong case. He subscribed to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's notion that lack of evidence did not mean something did not exist.

While that's true, lack of evidence does, in the end, mean lack of evidence. Sending a nation to war and hudreds, maybe thousands of American service members to their death (let alone ten or a hundred times that many Iraqis), you have to have somethign stronger than "We can't prove they don't have WMD."

Which seems to be all we had.

Bush Sr. on Iraq

I think Gary Trudeau has used this quote or a similar one in one of his strips in the last month or so. This comes from The Iraq War Reader (which I just picked up the other day, and whihc looks an excellent source) and is, in turn, an excerpt from A World Transformed by George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft.

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. ... Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we had hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the Untied States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.

Gaming going on this weekend

I'm going to be off doing soccer things Saturday, but I thought I'd pass it on for others who might be interested. ( click here for the full scoop )