Retired US Army Special Forces Master Sergeant Stan Goff on the use of chemical weapons in Halabja in 1988, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war (From the Wilderness Publications, 3/17/03):

Stephen Pelletiere was the Central Intelligence Agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. He was also a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000. In both roles, he had access to classified material from Washington related to the Persian Gulf. In 1991, he headed an Army investigation into Iraqi military capability. That classified report went into great detail on Halabja.

Halabja is the Kurdish town where hundreds of people were apparently poisoned in a chemical weapons attack in March 1988. Few Americans even knew that much. They only have the article of religious faith, "Saddam gassed his own people."

In fact, according to Pelletiere -- an ex-CIA analyst, and hardly a raging leftist like yours truly -- the gassing occurred in the midst of a battle between Iraqi and Iranian armed forces.

Pelletiere further notes that a "need to know" document that circulated around the US Defense Intelligence Agency indicated that US intelligence doesn't believe it was Iraqi chemical munitions that killed and aimed the Kurdish residents of Halabja. It was Iranian. The condition of the bodies indicated cyanide-based poisoning. The Iraqis were using mustard gas in that battle. The Iranians used cyanide.

3/16/03: The Washington Post and Washington Times on yesterday's antiwar protests in Washington, DC.

The Post put participation at 40,000 (police estimate) to 100,000 (organizers' estimate) with about 75 (police estimate) to 300 (organizers' estimate) counterprotesters. The Times's numbers: "Tens of thousands" (their lede) to 100,000 (organizers' estimate), and "about 50 counterprotesters." From the Post article: "Saad A. Kadhim, of the Iraqi American Anti-War Association, led a busload of 49 Iraqi Americans from New York City. Kadhim returned from Baghdad a few days ago and said people there were panicked and the mood tense. "It's not about Saddam Hussein anymore," he said. 'The Iraqi people see America as a threat.'" The Times article briefly mentions parallel antiwar protests in Athens, Bangkok, Bucharest, Cairo, Hong Kong, Madrid, Frankfurt, Moscow, and Tokyo; Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South Korea; "and scores of other cities in Europe, Asia and the Middle East." The Post did not mention protests outside Washington.

Eric Black in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 3/16/03, on neoconservative diplomatic ascendance in the Bush administration and resulting prospects of "perpetual war:"

In their vision, war with Iraq is followed by democratization of Iraq, then democratization -- by military means or otherwise -- of other Arab states, then a rolling of the momentum into Asia, with special emphasis on North Korea and China, [Carleton College Asia specialist Roy] Grow said.

[Foreign policy analyst John C.] Hulsman of the Heritage Foundation likened the group to a "drunken gambler, who keeps doubling down, betting his entire bankroll on every roll of the dice. The trouble is, they have to win every bet or they are wiped out."

Senator Jay Rockefeller calls for the FBI to investigate the Bush Administration's use of forged documents to support its claims that Iraq sought to purchase uranium. "An investigation should 'at a minimum help to allay any concerns' that the government was involved in the creation of the documents to build support for administration policies, Rockefeller wrote in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller." (AP reporter Ken Guggenheim in the Kansas City Star, 3/14/03.)

"George W. Queeg?" -- Paul Krugman in the New York Times, March 14, 2003:

Over the past few weeks there has been an epidemic of epiphanies. There's a long list of pundits who previously supported Bush's policy on Iraq but have publicly changed their minds. None of them quarrel with the goal; who wouldn't want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown? But they are finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more people than you would think -- including a fair number of people in the Treasury Department, the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon -- don't just question the competence of Mr. Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America's leadership has lost touch with reality.

Michael Walzer on " The Right Way" to oppose war in Iraq (New York Review of Books, 3/13/03):

We say of war that it is the "last resort" because of the unpredictable, unexpected, unintended, and unavoidable horrors that it regularly brings. In fact, war isn't the last resort, for "lastness" is a metaphysical condition, which is never actually reached in real life: it is always possible to do something else, or to do it again, before doing whatever it is that comes last. The notion of lastness is cautionary??" but this is a necessary caution: look hard for alternatives before you "let loose the dogs of war."

Right now, even at this last minute, there still are alternatives, and that is the best argument against going to war. I think that it is a widely accepted argument, even though it isn't easy to march with. What do you write on the placards? What slogans do you shout? We need a complicated campaign against the war, whose participants are ready to acknowledge the difficulties and the costs of their politics.

Or, better, we need a campaign that isn't focused only on the war (and that might survive the war)??"a campaign for a strong international system, organized and designed to defeat aggression, to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, to control weapons of mass destruction, and to guarantee the physical security of all the world's peoples.