Today’s soundtrack: it happened in Monterey
Today at 8:02pm: at the dojang


Today is Seiji’s birthday and the U.S. began bombing Baghdad. I watched the President give his speech on television. After that Seiji came over because I told him I’d take him out for a birthday drink. We went to a saké bar called Chibi’s with three German people.

Both the pro-war and the anti-war people are driving me nuts. Both have arguments that are easy to refute. People seem to easily hew to one side of the line or the other, only paying attention to the facts that support their particular argument. The worst are the retarded, uneducated conspiracy theorists you overhear on the subway.

The anti-war arguments I’ve heard are all ridiculously simplistic and seem to be spoken by people who choose to ignore certain facts and fail to propose realistic alternate solutions. The pro-war arguments are similarly simplistic and seem to be spoken by people completely removed from geopolitical reality and with little concept of the power of hatred.

What to believe? Here are some things reported by major news publications:

- Saddam has ordered hundreds of replicas of U.S military uniforms. The plan is to have his men dress as American soldiers and then brutalize Iraqi citizens on videotape. The footage would then be shown on Al-Jazeera as “proof” of American barbarism.

- Terrorist retaliation could come in the form of “slow-motion suicide bombers”--terrorists willingly infected with smallpox, sent to America to hang out in crowds and cough on people. All they’d have to do is walk around Disneyland, hang out in airports or go to crowded shopping malls.

- The projected cost of the war will far exceed any profits the U.S. could gain by “liberating” Iraqi oil, a fact the White House is aware of.

- One country that actually supports a war with Iraq...is Iraq. A survey of Iraqi citizens (as reported in Newsweek) claims they believe their situation cannot get any worse and would thus welcome a U.S. invasion to depose their dictator. Their lives under Saddam (and the sanctions that came with it) are miserable compared with their living conditions in 1980.

Which of these do you believe? I think people only believe what they want to believe. If one of the aformentioned paragraphs supports your inherent view you believe it, if not you say it’s propaganda.

What bothers me the most is that the countries that threatened U.N. Security Council vetoes--Russia, China, France--all have multi-billion-dollar contracts with Iraq. They would lose these contracts if war is waged with Iraq. I hate when people talk morals when they’ve got billions of dollars at stake. You can’t believe people where money is involved, whether they’re from the U.S. or someplace else.

The only fact I can believe is that the war is on, no matter what. Missiles have been fired, bombs dropped. This being the case, I think the only thing that everyone hopes for in common is that the war is over quickly.

So many paradoxes. No one likes war, and yet war has shaped the borders of most countries on the planet today. The borderlines between countries are not there because they flipped a coin; they’re there because that’s where the last soldier fell.

If you look at a globe, all those little colors signify where people live. The space between the colors is where people died.