June thoughts

It was about a year ago that I started to notice there was something going wrong in Iraq.
At that time, I was anti-Bush because of the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay and the preemptive war doctrine, and various other Canadian things like Arar and the border and softwood lumber, etc, etc. I had been opposed to the war in Iraq, and I was very glad that the Liberals had kept us out of it. But I had basically stopped paying a lot of attention to Iraq, thinking that things were basically progressing there, even though they hadn't found any weapons nor had they found the Husseins. More important to me was finding stories about Afganistan, where Canadian troops were fighting, even though Afganistan had basically disappeared from the news. But I thought, in spite of my earlier forebodings, that maybe Iraq was settling down and maybe Tony Blair could force some progress on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Then the constant drip, drip, drip of casualties began -- story after story, all with basically the same headline "US soldier killed in Iraq" "Two US soldiers killed in Iraq" " Tikrit blast kills three US soldiers" "Road bomb kills US soldier" -- on and on, day after day. I started to think the news editors were making mistakes, posting the previous day's story again. I kept thinking "but I read this already" as the stories kept on coming. As June, 2003 progressed, I thought maybe I was the one who was out-of-step -- the mainstream media didn't seem to notice or be bothered by these constant stories of casualties.
I had been reading Liberal Oasis occasionally since before the war started, but then I started following his links and reading further, discovering Josh Marshall and Antiwar.com and Eschaton and Counterspin. Then Dean started speaking out against the war, and he found such a response that I realized many, many Americans shared his anti-war view. And it was such a relief to realize that I was not alone in thinking that Iraq was a disaster for America. So that's basically what started this whole blog thing for me.