[on reading about the troubles of tony blair]

i think i should count myself ideologically lucky that this war is being pushed and will be prosecuted by a republican regime. i'm not *incredibly* naive--democrats are not forthrightly saints where republicans are sinners--but i have at least marginally better reasons to trust the intentions of democratic administrations, and it has occurred to me in the past few days that perhaps my conclusions about opposing the war would have been much more difficult to arrive at, had the administration not been so eminently untrustworthy to start with.

the question really is...is that ok? my current thought is yes, that's fine, for many of the moral/motivational reasons i've been harping on lately. democratic regimes have a(n at least marginally) better track record with respect to humanitarian interventions...that is to say, some of their interventions have actually been humanitarian, rather than blatantly self-serving or emptily ideological.

the hypothetical i've been considering goes something like this: what if some democrat were in the white house? what if al gore were in the white house? what if...um...bill bradley were in the white house? and what if he supported a war on iraq? what would i do then?

try as i might, i can't make the situation analogous to what's going on today. i cannot help but think that, despite their cowardly assent in congress, few democrats would actually have *proposed* war in iraq, that neither would a democratic president have contemplated an attack upon a nation that has neither attacked the united states nor prosecuted an ongoing genocide against its own people. further, i cannot envision gore or bradley or whomever stubbornly refusing all possible attempts at avoiding war. if for whatever reason a democratic president proposed a war and subsequent nationbuilding effort in iraq, i can't escape the conclusion that i would probably give it more consideration than i have given the bush propaganda...the point is that, considering the history and ideologies at play here, and what they mean for the actual outcome of this action, my conclusion is, i think, rational rather than mindlessly partisan.

...or maybe i'm just trying to make myself feel better. you be the judge.