Downtime

Hi everyone. Alexander has given us a fun-filled week of snot, choking and coughing. He doesn't know how to spit out the phlegm or blow his nose, so we have had to do it all for him.

We decided to bite the bullet and do DSL with Vonage (internet telephone). Hopefully that means everyone will hear from us some more.

I have been thinking some interesting things lately, but they will just have to wait for later. Now we are getting ready for grocery shopping.

I don't know if you have been paying much attention to politics lately, but the one must-read thing for the month, maybe the year, is the Downing Street Memo, concerning a secret report by the head of MI-6 to the heads of the British government from July 2002. It says that the Americans had already decided to invade Iraq by then, and were fixing the facts around the policy of pre-emptive war. It was leaked just before the British election.

You know, I think this really takes the cake for me. I remember when Bush addressed the nation the first time to say we would invade Iraq because of the dangerous WMDs. I remember thinking "You'd better be right about this" and I saw it as a gamble on the legitimacy of his presidency. Colin Powell did his song and dance at the UN, and we all believed them. Thousands of military and police deaths, and tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Then, the story goes, they lied to us repeatedly.