Opal-Tallulah/war

"In Mr. Bush's world, there are only two kinds of Americans: those who are against terrorism, and those who somehow are all right with it. Some Americans want to win in Iraq and some don't. There are Americans who support the troops and Americans who don't support the troops. And at the root of it all is the hideously damaging fantasy that there is a gulf between Americans who love their country and those who question his leadership. "

"What's dangerous about what's going on right now is that an electoral defeat of the Republicans next week, and perhaps a similar defeat in a presidential race two years from now, might fool some people into thinking that the responsibility for the Iraq war can be sunk forever with George Bush and the Republican politicians who went down with his ship. But in fact the real responsibility for the Iraq war lay not with Bush but with the Lettermans, the Wolf Blitzers, the CNNs, The New York Timeses of the world -- the malleable middle of the American political establishment who three years ago made a conscious moral choice to support a military action that even a three-year-old could have seen made no fucking sense at all."

"WASHINGTON - Liam Madden opposed the war in Iraq even before he deployed with his Marine unit in late 2004. But he came home convinced more than ever that the war was wrong.

"The more informed I got, the more I opposed the war," said Madden, 22, a Marine Corps sergeant in Quantico, Va. "The more people who died there, the longer we stayed there, the more I opposed the war. The more I know, the easier it is to support withdrawal."

Madden is one of about 118 members of the U.S. military who plan to petition Congress asking that U.S. forces be withdrawn from Iraq and brought home, said attorney J.E. McNeil. McNeil is advising the grassroots group of active-duty service members, who organized the petition drive through a Web site appealforredress.org [appealforredress.org] ). "

"Joyce Miller, an official with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that learned that information on some of its antiwar protests was in the military database, said she found the operation to be a "chilling" and troubling trend."

Making sense of the different statistics we hear concerning the number of deaths in Iraq.

""He was fired on by American soldiers as a minibus carried wounded people away," Coroner Andrew Walker said at the conclusion of the inquest, which U.S. soldiers declined to attend."

"Never pick a fight you know you cannot win. Or so I was told. Pick an argument if you must, but not a fight. Nothing I have read or heard in recent weeks suggests that fighting Iran over its nuclear enrichment programme makes any sense at all. The very talk of it - macho phrases about "all options open" - suggests an international community so crazed with video game enforcement as to have lost the power of coherent thought.

"Iran is a serious country, not another two-bit post-imperial rogue waiting to be slapped about the head by a white man. It is the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Its population is heading towards 80 million by 2010. Its capital, Tehran, is a mighty metropolis half as big again as London. Its culture is ancient and its political life is, to put it mildly, fluid."