Things get lost.  I haven’t yet found that pocket knife nor have I found some important papers I tucked away to keep safe. I should be more careful.  After all, that knife has two blades and I kept them sharp and could hurt someone rather than just cut string and open up boxes.  I would think that losing a whole slew of “conventional” explosives is just as bad as mistaking possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction and not finding either.

I read History a lot to get a degree in it.  I did graduate study and research and found that documentation is among the driest subjects in the world.  Everything is reduced to words and it takes a lot of skill to make those words meaningful enough to keep you awake to get to the end of the document. We have been reading many documents in recent days about how a hoard of explosives that our soldiers were guarding has gone missing and is still being picked over by zealots who have a need to use them on our troops and on other Iraqis.  The story is a sordid one and has gotten lost or its meaning missed in these final days of trivial exchanges by candidates who may or may not change the course of World History by being elected.

There is a lot of destruction to the democratic process during the course of the campaigning for prizes on November 2, 2004 for the next Presidency and supporting cast of one third of the Senate and the entire House of Representatives.  This is the equivalent of exploding here in America that cache of explosives that has melted away in Iraq. The way we vote and have those votes counted are explosive.

I think insistence upon either there was or there was not WMD in Iraq and this is the cause for invasion by the United States with a few other soldiers from a few other countries is a bogus issue.  WAR is the issue and America is at war with a country that has not gone down to defeat and is not responding to protestations that we have given them the option to become democratized.  Any weapon used to kill innocents and uniformed soldiers (hard to find any of these in Iraq that are not members of the US forces) is just plain war and war should finally be discussed as THE issue before the world.  How long must we have our children raised to be soldiers to fight in strange places? How long before we get voting straightened out?

Our country is exploding over polling places and the ill use of reason and careful planning to make democracy work here at home much less impose it upon places like Afghanistan and Iraq.  Where will our nation transformation impulse take us when we cannot hold orderly and honest elections here at home?