War and Peace
Salam Pax's postings have become increasingly cynical - maybe even a litle despairing - in the past month or two. Now his parents' house has been searched by the US Army.

“They came, freaked out my mother, pissed off my father, found nothing and left.
After refusing to get one my father finally conceded to get one of those cards that basically say you are a “collaborator”.”

Not a flip remark. Apparently, it's not safe to be to perceived as being in league with the Americans.

Still think we're winning? Apparently the right-wing ideologues do. I'm having trouble deciding where denial ends and cluelessness begins with these guys. They'd probably tell you that Salam and I are both part of the problem - foot soldiers in the army of fifth columnists who will be responsible if things don't go the way they're supposed to. Then again, as an Open Software writer and user, I'm a criminal as well as a traitor, so it's no wonder that I'm subverting the true path of freedom and liberty*.

It's easier to blame someone else when things go wrong than to admit that the policies you favored were flawed. That would too close to taking responsibility for your opinions and actions. And that can't be allowed in this blame culture (which itself, of course, is blamed on those traitorous liberals).

I was never a big fan of Ronald Reagan, but I always admired him for standing up and saying that the blame was ultimately his when something major (e.g., the blowing up of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983) went wrong on his watch. I can't imagine any leading politician of this time doing the same. I mean, can you imagine Gray Davis taking the blame for the California budget? Bush for the economy? Tony Blair for misleading Parliament? Clinton for Mogadishu? Katherine Harris for the election debacle in Florida?

No, it's somebody else's fault. It's always somebody else's fault. The right has the dubious distinction of playing the blame game better, but that's just one more indication that the left is in disarray.

Remember when politicians actually took some responsibility for their actions and policies? Remember when it was a sign of character to admit when you were wrong and that self-restraint and tact were once considered virtues? Remember when Republicans were actually fiscal conservatives and Democrats actually believed in standing up for the working man?

Has the society we live in really progressed from the one our parents lived in when they were our age?

*(But once more, for the record: I'd love to be proven wrong. I'd love to see attacks against us and the British slowly wind down. I'd love to see a successful reconstruction of Iraq that resulted in a stable and prosperous democracy. I'd love to see the repressive Islamic fundamentalists in Iran overthrown and replaced by a representative democracy. I'd love to see Osama and Saddam captured and tried for their crimes. I submit, once again, that you need an effective grand strategy to achieve most of these aims and that the present strategy, including the near-unilateral invasion of Iraq (with a force too small to successfully occupy it), is badly thought out, deeply flawed, and carries too high a risk of failure.)