…went on in Seattle and other cities worldwide on Saturday, despite the war having been mostly turned into an occupation mission by the previous Thursday. As I’d expected it to be, it was a smaller affair with a greater concentration of the hardcore protest community, some of whom went “off topic” with speeches and signs about assorted other issues. It also attracted a couple of aged-male dittohead counter-protestors shouting, vehement but pre-practiced insults.

Yes, I still believe those of us who protested this war were right to have done so.

Saddam Hussein could’ve been restrained and/or removed without this life- and infrastructure-wasting tragedy. The twelve years of sanctions only kept him and his cronies iin power while impoverishing the rest of the nation. And the UN weapons inspections were working, it now turns out. Saddam was effectively a threat only to his own citizens.

Because Iraq’s government and institutions were designed solely to serve him, he leaves behind a big nothing, a land without a society except that of the US/UK occupation force and the long-simmering ethnicities and other revenge-minded factions.

Iraq might seem now like a big-budget version of Panama or Grenada, a quick-and-relatively-clean invasion/coup. But it puts the U.S. in what still might become a morass of Vietnam proportions.

We’re now going to create, and will have to keep propping up, a client state with powerful, permanent, internal and external opposition. The Republicans talk about promoting “democracy” there, but will certainly try to devise a system in which U.S. stooges and yes-men have all the power. The Islamic fundamentalists (whom Saddam was never one of) will exploit this at every opportunity. This could get messier and messier for years to come.

Antiwar “radicals” like to oversimplify geopolitical situations even more than prowar “conservatives” do. But complication is what we’re gonna get anyway.

Some side topics:

• That much-telecast image of a Saddam statue’s demolition was probably a staged media event created entirely by the US military, with a couple dozen Iraqis brought in as extras.
• Meanwhile, the situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate for everybody except US business interests.