If we only knew then....

One of the main reasons I started a blog was so I could vent, so today it will serve its purpose. I haven't been able to blog as much as I planned because a week after I started the blog I decided to start a website with two friends, so that is now occupying my time. But after my Dad sent me a great article from NY Times columnist Frank Rich, I will blog.

I used to get fired up about the war. I can remember getting in arguments with my friends before the elections 2004 after studying abroad and passionately arguing how it was a mistake. Now, I am almost numb to the war. It isn't that I don't care, it's just that I feel like my point, and everyone else who opposed the war, has been proven. What more can I say or do? After awhile "I told you so" loses its allure.

But there are times when I still get fired up, and now is one of them. Four years have gone by and what have we seen? Videos of Saddam hanging, carbombs going off, Baby Noor or whatever her name was.....

Hopefully, if nothing else, the past four years will teach us the pitfalls of over exuberance and the danger of having an idiot in the white house.

The following are quotes and comments taken from Frank Rich's NY times article.

March 6, 2003
President Bush holds his last prewar news conference. The New York Observer writes that he interchanged Iraq with the attacks of 9/11 eight times, “and eight times he was unchallenged.” The ABC News White House correspondent, Terry Moran, says the Washington press corps was left “looking like zombies.”


March 7, 2003
Appearing before the United Nations Security Council on the same day that the United States and three allies (Britain, Spain and Bulgaria) put forth their resolution demanding that Iraq disarm by March 17, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, reports there is “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”. He adds that documents “which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic.” None of the three broadcast networks’ evening newscasts mention his findings.
[In 2005 ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.]

March 19, 2003
President Bush declares war from the Oval Office in a national address: “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure.”
Price of a share of Halliburton stock: $20.50
[Value of that Halliburton share on March 16, 2007, adjusted for a split in 2006: $64.12.]