"Morituri Te Salutamus"

...was the salute of the gladiators to the Emperor immediately before they began combat. (Though, in many more cases than the average Joe, influenced by Hollywood's version of life in the arena, thinks, the fights were not to the death)

I wonder how it tranlates into Arabic? It seems that the phrase could come in handy for some diehard denizens of Baghdad.

This isn't news to me, as I wrote the same damn thing a few weeks ago, and have thought that for months. While I'd like to beat on my chest and claim clairvoyance, it's a fairly obvious predidction for anyone the least bit familiar with matters martial to make.

There is a more important, and difficult question. What are we going to do about it? I've been thinking quite a bit about this, and here's what I would say to Bush43 if I could get his ear for five minutes:

"We need to start the psyops now. Yesterday, two weeks ago, in fact, and for a few reasons.

One, is to get the civilians out. If they start now, some at least will be able to pack up and go before Saddam catches on. It'll be too late once our divisions are massed on the border. By then, Saddam will have the city locked up tight, and it will mean death for any Iraqi civilian to try and escape. Saddam needs his human shields, and he needs his citizens to die wholesale for the TV cameras, so he can try and drum up world opinion to stop the US Army tearing Baghdad apart brick by brick until we put his head on a pike.

The first combat air missions over Baghdad need to be dropping leaflets, not bombs. And they need to say exactly the opposite of what your dad told the world. He took pains to point out that GWI was not about Saddam. You need to say that's exactly who and what it's about. Let them know that you're willing to let him surrender peacefully, and go live out his life on Diego Garcia in comfortable exile. Make sure Saddam knows that offer ends after the first US serviceman dies in the war.

Saddam can bluster all he wants to the people about how he'll win this war, but when the Iraqi people see that he can't even stop the paper from raining down, they'll start wondering how he's gonna stop the shrapnel.

Oh, and forget all this idiotic surgical attack on Baghdad stuff. You try that and all you're going to have is a bunch of good men cut off. It'll make Mogadishu look like a paintball game. Bring 250,000 to this party, more if you can, and make sure the Iraqi street knows it.

Second, we need to start, in the minds of his troops, the process of delinking Saddam's survival from their own. His rank and file have already decided to fold as soon as they can. It's the hard-core troops, the Guards, that we need to work on, hopefully until only those few hundred of his fanatics are left to fight for him.

So, George, start beating the drum. Beat it so loud and hard that they cannot help but hear you on the streets of Baghdad. I don't care if the first airborne assault is on the HQ of Al-Jazeera news network - take control of the airwaves, radio and TV. Hack into his networks - you've only got the best geeks on the planet at hand. Start treating his people to the preview GWII vidclips, coming soon to a city near you. I'm sure we've got lots of footage from your dad's combat interruptus to use, and maybe you can get some of those Hollywood FX wizards to gin you up some more modern-looking stuff, with the latest weapons. Hollywood doesn't like you, but it's been proven they'll do anything for money.

Make sure you tell them that Saddam is going to gas them. You can bet he's not going to warn them. Reinforce the lesson with some of those pics of the casualties from the war with Iran, and from when he gassed the Kurds. Show them clips of the Iraqis surrendering in masse in GWI. Promise humane treatment if they surrender, and lots of aid for the country afterwards. The carrot and the stick.

Lie, fake 'em out. Make 'em think you've gotten pissed off, gone crazy. They're used to that in the Middle East. Chew on some carpet if you have to. If you're not that good an actor, find an actor that looks like you, and have him do it. Threaten to nuke the city if Saddam uses his WMD.

The world will go nuts, but what the hell are they gonna do about it? The press will jump you like Slick Willie on an intern when Hilary's not lookin', but it's tough to be the leader of the free world, and you have to have a thick skin. That flak you'll catch ain't harder than dyin'. You can always write in your memoirs later you never really meant it. The only people that won't believe you are the ones that hate you already anyway.

I really don't care if you do use a nuke, and I don't think most of the people in the US do, either. Use it to scare the hell out of them. Consider popping a little bitty one outside Baghdad, in the desert, far enough away not to hurt them, but close enough for them to see it. An airburst at the right altitude will mean little or no fallout.

Or maybe the bright boys at Aberdeen can help you rig up the world's largest fuel air bomb. Get it big enough, drop it a little closer, and it'll look like a small nuke. That one you can let the fireball touch the ground for that good ol' mushroom cloud look. Hell, forget the dropping. You can wheel it in if you need to, and build it in place.

Don't waste any more time trying to make the case against Saddam. There's no one anywhere, in any country, that has not already made up his mind, and nothing you can do will change them. Just go to Congress, and ask for a flat out declaration of total war. They'll give it to you. They've read the polls, and know that We The People will have their asses for a ham sandwhich if they don't.

But all this may not work, so you better get the American people ready for a tough one. Tell them before we go any farther that it might mean a whole damn bunch of sons and fathers coming home in body bags before it's all over. You owe it to them.

Because if all this bluster and intimidation don't work, if the Guards don't rout, and it comes down to a house-to-house, brick-by-brick knifefight, we're gonna lose about ten thousand troops, maybe more, and the Iraqis are gonna lose about ten time that many, with an awful lot of those being civilians.

That's an awful lot of people dying just because you don't like the taste of carpet."

You are so right. Trying to wait for public opinion to turn towards supporting American military action against Saddam is futile. Keep in mind there are tons of people who are pissed we retaliated for 9/11! WHATEVER!

Haven't we learned anything? Everyone said 9/11 was Clinton's fault for not "doing something" about Bin Laden during his presidency. In reality, there was no way at that time that he could have. People in our country and other countries wouldn't have stood for it. Flippin' bleeding hearts.

Now they're whining again. But I say, let's learn from the past. Don't wait until thousands are killed to remove terrorists from power. They choose their own fate. If we have to be the world's policemen, so be it.

The worst part is, America will do the job, the rest of the world will whine about us sticking our nose in what is not our business, but THEY will be enjoying the security of a Saddam-free world. Hypocrites.

Sir,
I would just like to say that you have a very entertaining take on why and how the US should go about murdering civilians halfway across the world to fulfill a perverted sense of Manifest Destiny.

To support fascism in the 21st century you have brought up three fairly creative arguments: 1) It's Morally Correct, 2) It is democratically correct, and finally 3) We must combat terrorism.

Beginning with the first, the argument of moral correctness: If one fights a war, innocent people will die. Killing innocent people is called murder. We do not hold it to be morally correct. That alone should disprove the contention, but your logic is further convoluted by long ramblings on the elimination of totalitarian regimes. First of all, that is the prerogative of the UN alone, rather than an armchair revolutionary waving a copy of the Monroe Doctrine. The second, and more practical reason, is that, as we have seen in Afghanistan, building a government is far harder than deposing one. Do you support subjecting untold generations of Iraqis to another Puppet regime, possibly more dangerous to them than Saddam? Fulgencio Batista comes to mind for some reason.

The second argument raised for the warmongering in question was that, and i quote, "We the People will have [congress'] asses for a ham sandwich." Being less rhetorical, and more logical than you, I’ll summarize this as some sort of perversion of Majority Rule. To get things straight, the US population - your precious We the People - Are not the majority in any international circumstance. One billion Chinese, and one billion Indians might have something to say about that. Of course, Why should those Indians and those Chinese have any say in the matter? After all, it isn't their war. Well, it isn't your war either. Iraq poses no threat. Saddam knows that if he so much as lifts a finger against the US, Bush will have an actual reason to kill him and everything around him. He may be crazy, but he's not stupid; in fact, the only way to make Saddam use his weapons against the US is to put him in a position where he has no other choice.

The other way in which you established that Iraq posed a threat to the US was through supporting terrorist groups. Let's just say for the moment that you didn't just give us your say so, and that there was actually some sort of evidence from a reliable source, floating out there, somewhere. The response to that knowledge is not, "Lets bomb them back to the stone age" as some tacticians have said before, but rather, "So what?" It's time that the American people stopped fooling themselves, and running about the globe chasing after smoke on the wind. It the simple truth that terrorism is not a realistic threat. In the month of September, 2001 in the sovereign state of New York there were more deaths caused by traffic accidents than terrorist activity. Seems simple enough when put in perspective. I might also add that the way to stop traffic accidents is not to blame another country and then shoot at them until no one crashes their cars any more. To solve the problem of terrorism the US must take an internal view of it. Maybe be more open minded. Stop making themselves a target through this my-way-is-the-only-way foreign policy of death, and perhaps take others views into account. If you champion any ideal, you make yourself a target. Before you're ready to risk that, be very sure that you're championing the right ideals.

So in a short, apt and obviously unheeded summary, don’t go sticking your nose in other people's business.