I'LL ONLY POST ONCE TODAY. Lewis Lapham has a fine essay in the April 2003 Harper's. It's not online, so make do with this excerpt before you go out an get your copy from the newsstand:

"The question most often asked of the American mission to Iraq can be reduced to two words: 'Why now?' I've listened to numerous explanations--the weather, America's credibility at stake, Saddam about to poison Israel's reservoirs--but I suspect that the best answer is the simplest. War is easier than peace. The government elects to punish an enemy it perceives as weak because it's easier to send aircraft carriers to the Persian Gulf than to attempt the harder task of making an American society not so wretchedly defaced by its hungry children, its crowded prisons, and its corporate thieves."


- posted by thegusdad @ 3/19/2003 10:11:00 AM