***Dave Does the Blog

Dedicated to Harold Pinter, who’s been kind enough to bless us (or the Guardian) with his poetic wisdom, here is a poem inspired by his own latest work.

Here they go again,
The Euroliterati in their sackcloth parade
Chanting their ballads of doom
As they bleat across the big world
Damning whatever America’s doing at the moment.
The gutters are clogged with the dead from the regimes they support:
The Bosnians in Yugoslavia
The Kurds in Iraq
The women in Afghanistan
The dissenters in Cuba
The students in China
The citizens of North Korea
The prisoners in the gulags
The ones who worked in the wrong office buildings on the wrong day in New York.
The has-been poets use words to try and cut.
Their heads are full of sand
Their ideas a pile of dirt
Their idols stained and dusty
Their bright lights have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of their dead theories
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of their impotent fury.

Thank you. I’ll be here all week …

(via Volokh and Andrea)

Realing that the UN inspectors in country are having difficulties finding enough material breaches on their own, Iraq is forming their own teams of inspectors to help out with things.

It said Iraq had handed more documents to inspectors, was clarifying others and was forming its own teams to search for suspicious items. U.N. inspectors discovered empty chemical warheads last week which Iraq had failed to report to the United Nations; Iraq said it had forgotten about them.

Iraqi officials went on to say that they would do a much better job of hiding all remaining chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in the future.

The statement said Iraq would also encourage inspections of “private sites” — an apparent reference to places like the homes of leading scientists — and to “private interviews” — referring to talks between U.N. inspectors and Iraqi technical experts without the presence of Iraqi government minders.

“Just let us check out their houses first, to make sure things are tidy, that’s all we ask.”

Saddam thanks anti-war demonstrators.

I’ll bet he does.

To be fair, a lot of folks against war in Iraq are certainly not fans of the Baghdad regime. That they think it can be dealt with through Flower Power, further negotiation (over what?), or good vibes is simply an implementation detail, as a senior program analyst I used to know would say.

Of course, Saddam betrayed some of his unintentional irony in his comments.

“They are supporting you because they know that evildoers target Iraq to silence any dissenting voice to their evil and destructive policies,” Saddam told senior military officers and his son Qusay, the commander of the elite Republican Guards.

If that were the case, I’d think that the French and Germans would be more worried.

“Iraq’s cause has become clear…it simply is that Iraqis are in their country while others cross the seas to reach them and tell them ‘we want to share with you your country or we want to be the masters and you the followers’,” Saddam said.

Sort of like Kuwait?

“When a people believe in the justice of its cause, it can stand fast in the face of evil, no matter what equipment or technology it has. This is the lesson that you are teaching the world now,” Saddam said.

Actually, I think he’s right there. Unfortunately, I think he’s got the “face of evil” on the wrong party here.

(via Andrea)