'Tis a joy to be slothful!

I didn't get a Sunday in last weekend. The presentation I spent all Saturday writing I spent most of yesterday putting into PowerPoint--and I still have gaps that are to filled with examples I scrounge up at work this week. PowerPoint is such a time sink. Even if you don't do anything fancy (and I didn't), slides have a way of simply multiplying. It's like web work in that sense.

On top of that, I was tired the whole time because I made the mistake of talking to the People Who Don't Sleep (rollick and her friend Chris) after "Shaolin Soccer" Saturday night. Every time I thought my sleepiness was winning the battle with my need to gab, someone would introduce a fascinating new topic and we'd be off again. Finally, cassielsander's snoring and my lingering sense of responsibility got me out of the house and into a cab at Irving and Western.

I was so tired yesterday that I couldn't even stay awake until the end of "Children of Dune". I was lying on the couch with Monshu wondering which of us was going to nod off first when I realised that, if I grabbed the bed now, he'd probably stick with the couch. (I felt guilty in the middle of night and traded with him, since I knew I'd get the bed again in a few hours when he got up to make coffee.)

So, when I woke up this morning still feeling exhausted, I decided to make this my Sunday. I called in sick and proceeded to nap until I couldn't nap no more. I rationalised playing hooky by telling myself I'd do errands this afternoon. But, unfortunately, I've got this perverse kind of instant karma that ensures that, if I call in sick, I almost always actually get sick. I feel dizzy, sluggish, and out of it and the prospect of traipsing about in the warm sunshine doesn't have the appeal it did when I conceived of this plan.

The errands can wait, but dinner with bunj and e. and Traviata afterwards can't. I take heart from the fact that I've gone to the opera feeling under the weather before and nevertheless enjoyed myself. Granted, that was with better operas than this one, but I'm hoping to feed off bunj's enthusiasm.

If France didn't want the US pushing them around, they shouldn't have supported George Washington

A sentiment I've now heard from serveral sources is, "If we didn't want Saddam to have these weapons, we shouldn't have given them to him during the Iran-Iraq war." The simple logic of this argument is unassailable, yet you have to wonder if those making it have thought it through. I mean, what would a policy based on such logic look like?

As far as I can tell, it would be One Strike And You're Out. Countries get one chance to make the right decision when it comes to picking and supplying allies and, if that ally turns on them in the future, they have to stand back and take their lumps. It doesn't matter if the geopolitics have completely shifted in the meantime; there are no take-backs. Even if that ally should become the Taliban, there's no going in and trying to rectify the situation.

I don't understand this. I thought that one of the major lessons from 9/11 was that disengagement doesn't work. If we do get involved, we'll make horrible mistakes and catch a lot of flak, but if we don't, it'll bite us in the ass anyway.

What we really need is some kind of check on foreign policy to ensure that governments only intervene if it improves the situation in the long run. This is where I think cassielsander's criticisms about "power without responsibility" are right on target. The problem with a lot of the USA's military interventions is that, if things went south, it just lumped it and left. Heck, this happened even when things went well--Gulf War I being the perfect example ("the right war for the wrong reason or the wrong war for the right reason", as princeofcairo likes to say).

Since war still seems inevitable, I haven't given up hope that it might end up being the right war, though for the wrong reasons and done the wrong way. (I'd really like to think that it wasn't necessary to alienate so many allies and do such potential damage to international institutions.) If it isn't, then I hope the next administration has the wisdom, expertise, and dedication to clean up whatever mess this one has left behind.