Here we are in 2002. Time of flying cars, of mapped genomes, of atomic household robots, of the internet, of interplanetary exploration, of nanotechnology, of jetpacks for everyone, and of entertainment on demand and in the home. A truly sophisticated time. We live in the future. An impossible future. And what are we doing? Talking about going to war again.

Hussein is a threat, but his record of abuses is not so different from the U.S.'s own record. We treated Iraq like a cheap whore's cunt, the same way we treated Vietnam and Panama. We deliberately destroyed Iraq's water purification camps. Our soldiers deliberately shot surrending Iraqis and civilians. One general, if you buy the credible New Yorker story, committed a horrible attrocity -- read mass murder -- on the Trail of Death leading from the south into Bagdhad. We not only destroyed the infrastructure and hit civilians with our pansy-ass cruise missles (to keep our boys who are PAID to risk their lives from possibly dying, even though they acted sloppily during the war and died due to friendly fire, not Iraqis), but we littered the nation with depeted uranium rounds. As a result, Iraq has birth defects, incidents of disease from contaminated water, lower lifespans, etc. -- not to mention our "sanctions," which killed even more. And our own soldiers were, again as in past wars, treated like chattel: they picked up depleted uranium and were exposed to chemicals that caused "Gulf War Syndrome." Great... . The only ones who did well in the war were the arms companies, who sold our patriot missles by the billions of dollars despite that they didn't work (hey, the TV doesn't lie, right?), and the Bushes and the Chaneys, who either got personal payoffs or had companies that made money out of it all. Fucking great.

Now, no one's going to argue that the invasion of Kuwait was a good thing. No one's nominating Saddam for a peace prize. But we have a really, really shitty record at war. Sure, we "win" -- but we're sloppy. We fuck a nation into the ground, kill civilians, commit war crimes, and even fuck over our own troops. We're sloppy as hell. The U.S. just does not do a good job at war. Quality is out the window, but we've never been beaten for quantity: we can kick the shit out of anyone in terms of pure firepower, but we're likely to hit a lot of schools, Red Cross buildings, wedding ceremonies, and villages -- all of which happened in Afghanistan -- along with the one guy we want. Sloppy.

I have no problem with benevolent imperialism. I just don't think the U.S. has a record of careful intervention. We don't get the terrorists: we get their cities and countries. We don't get Sadaam or Noreiga: we get their people and their countries. This is not a good record. We've got a lot of experience but not much precision.

I love the U.N. But it's too diplomatic, too impotent. I applaud Bush for being willing to stand against it. I have no problem with proactive attacks on terrorists. I just think we need to establish a record of not committing war crimes before we attack others for doing so. And I think we need to hit the right guys.

I'm so fucking sick of this bullshit about collateral damage, this lack of sympathy. If you feel that way, fuck you. You should have been born somewhere else so that you could have been rounded up by U.S. troops in Panama and shot in the street or burned in your homes. If you can't recognize their suffering as equal to the suffering of U.S. citizens, fuck you. There are flames being stoked for you down below, so don't worry that you missed out in life -- you'll get yours after death, I assure you. And you'll thank me for the lesson.

The truth is that I'd love to see us intervene around the world. Like building schools in Afghanistan instead of criticizing them for not having women in their schools -- while they have no school system at all, and only 10% of boys are educated compared with that horrible 3% of girls. America needs to get its head out of its stuck-up ass with its privileged concerns. Let's worry about these very Western concerns when the people aren't eating grass, okay? Let's talk about patent violations when we don't have a fucking plague in Africa that's going to eradicate life on major portions of the continent. Let's worry about a few school shootings when we don't still have warlords killing people by the tens of thousands, particularly in places not in Europe and thus apparently not populated with people whose souls count.

If we want to be the world's policemen, we have to have a stern conduct code and a strict internal affairs office.

The war on Iraq is projected to cost some $8 billion per month. Let's put this in perspective. That could feed a lot of starving nations for years. That could eradicate common diseases in Africa. That could give a lot of the world a lot of intrastructure, roads, libraries, water, electricity.

Yes, I know we'd rather bomb things. We'd rather destroy than build. But if you're a nationalistic, self-interest fuck, you'd better think about the hatred of the U.S. we're spreading by taking out a sovereign nation's leadership -- and about the good will we'd be spreading by spending eight fucking billion dollars -- a month -- on, say, hospitals and education and disease prevention and irrigation for the third world.

In the old analogy of the carrot and the stick, we prefer the stick. And to hit a lot of people near the guy we want. That doesn't make people like you. In fact, that's a recipe for a lot of people to hate you, to call you "the Great Satan," and to be willing to die to hurt you in terrorist attacks. After World War II, we rebuilt Germany and Japan. We put conditions on their governments, such as no offensive military, that not only ensured our own protection but kept their governments on the right track. And Germany and Japan have economies that are thriving. They're major trading partners. We vacation there. It's pretty hard to hate a nation that fucking helped rebuild your ass up from a burned-out husk. And didn't just take you over. Or use you as slaves. Or give your women as the spoils of war to the allied commanders. You want to stop terrorism? You want to ensure that a country won't fuck with you in the future? You beat them down when they get out of line, but you also help them. You build them up. You don't knock them down and run away. You take responsibility. And thus you earn good will. You earn your status as world leaders.

And we've done a shitty, shitty job of it.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

Okay, this column is precisely one week late. I now owe you five extra columns, on my honor. I just don't seem able, with all I'm doing, to do more than about a column a week. And I've got a biweekly column on comic books at continuitypages.com. The number of missed weeks here exactly corresponds to the number of columns there, and I think that's no coincidence. So this means that, as of now, this column is officially going bi-weekly. Sorry. But you're still getting a weekly column -- just split over two sites.

A lot is going on here on the message board. Please join us.

As alluded to earlier, a new column of mine is up on continuitypages.com. That new column (Sequential Cuture #3) is entitled X-Men is Not an Allegory of Racial Tolerance. It pays close attention to the original conception of the X-Men to debunk this conventional notion, this inherited interpretation.

September 2002 usage data has now been added to the usage page. Visits are down on account of continuitypages.com splitting off from this site. Please, please help me regain my ego and generate more visits. Tell your friends, please. Post links on message boards, please. Whore yourself for Darius.

Your assignment this week is to forgive my lapse. Then get whoring.

And wish me a happy birthday on 6 October.