Soon It Will Be Over, Over There
Lileks is brilliant today. Well, every day. But today is special. It's the day after the State of the Union.

He’s tired. This is taking a lot out of him. Think back to the post 9/11 climate, and remember the feeling you’d get in your stomach when you read a story headlined “Does Al Qaeda have a nuke?” or “Smallpox fears rise” - it seemed as if the one thick thread that held your world together was about to get a good hard yank. Some forget how every day brought the same routine - news report, a hot squirt of fear in your stomach, a quick imposition of denial, then . . . well, you had to make dinner, or pick the kids up, or take the dog to the vet. We lived in these twin worlds of the Now and the Horribly Possible. The latter, thank God, hasn’t happened yet.

Imagine, however, that your Now is also your Horribly Possible, and you live there 24-7. And imagine that every day you read intelligence reports that suggest the Possible is quite Likely. It would take its toll on a fellow.

So what do I take away from the speech? Nothing I didn’t know before. I always thought Iraq was next. Defeating Iraq isn’t the camel’s nose in the tent - it’s the camel’s head in the bed of every other Arab leader.

Let's say I'm a 44-year old Iraqi man with a two-year old girl and a wife who worked in the Ministry of Justice and came home every day weeping because someone else had been taken away, I would hear this speech and be filled with piercing fear and incandescent hope and the two emotions would wrestle every day until it was over. When you think about it, a postwar Iraq might actually be safer from WMD than New York City. It’ll be over for them. We’ve no idea when it’ll be over for us.


Also brilliant, as usual: Victor Davis Hanson, who calls the speech "an elemental talk about life and death, good and evil," and dimisses the Democrats' response as being the response of a party that is "on the wrong side of history in opposing the removal of a deadly fascist, in a post-9/11 world where there is no margin of error."

Read 'em both.