Now that the war has been going on for a couple of weeks I should probably give an update. I was surfing over to Patrick Nielsen Hayden's archliberal weblog yesterday, which I don't read very often, but it was full of reportage of righteous left-wing indignation about the war in general and every little thing that's been going on that illustrates the depravity to which we've sunk as a nation. Personally I think things have been going reasonably well. The American/British casualties are numbered in the 10's, Saddam hasn't been seen for weeks, the Iraqi army is folding up faster than the tanks can run over them, what more could you ask for? The immediacy of reportage certainly keeps the war in the forefront of people's minds, making it seem endless even after only a few days, and tends to blow out of proportion every little thing that happens, whether its American POW's being captured or the occasional civilian that foolishly ends up in harms way. Liberals, Democrats, whatever, are as a general rule very focused on the individual, and that individual's right to exist and right to a million other things. War is full of individuals and individual stories, but it traffics in the movement of ideologies and nations, which are gestalts of the individuals that participate in them. "The greater good" is a difficult concept for liberals and/or Democrats (basically the same thing in my book) when its measured in human life, because liberals are so intent on improving >everyone's< long-term position, and the more downtrodden or representation-less someone is the more the liberals want to help them. Now, I consider myself to be a liberal, I'm all for government regulation of big business and strict environmental controls and a woman's right to choose, yadda yadda. So I seem to be at odds, at least here in cradle of liberty, bastion of liberalism Massachusetts, with most of the liberals around me as far as this war goes. If it looked like we didn't know what we were doing, or if there was no clear objective, or if this started to drag on for months and months with no progress being made, then sure I'd start to question the rationale of continuing to be there. But it seems to be a little early to making calls for "bring the boys back home" just when things are getting going, and particularly when they're going so well.