After rounding up all the supplies and making contact with my assistant, we jumped in her car and headed west from my fortified compound on the Mason-Dixon Line to the Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI). During the two hour drive to the city of my beloved Orioles (sell the team Peter Angelos) the spirits real, imagined, and in liquid form led me to break in my new assistant with behavior some people would call erratic, but mostly non-violent. She proved her worth and her tough Irish heritage was on display as the saucy young lass somehow reigned me in and kept me on an even keel during the most grueling part of our trip (when the songs on the radio sucked). Finally, arriving at BWI, I was able to get past the take-your-shoes-off, your-hat-too-sir crack squad of post 9/11 security. Somehow my captive bead ring Prince Albert did not set off the medal detector so a good solid groping and stern looks by Baltimore’s finest was not in the cards.

AUSTIN, Texas -- One reason despair is not an option is because things can always get worse, and then what'll we do? I was actually trying to figure that out when I came across a remarkable article written for the The Nation magazine (known for its liberalism for 141 years) by Richard J. Whalen -- a conservative in good standing, a former Nixon staffer. Whalen has undertaken the singularly valuable task of talking to dissenting generals about the war in Iraq.

            I suppose one could argue, and I am sure someone will, that these are mostly retired generals. Some, like Lt. Gen. William Odom, are calling Iraq "the worst strategic mistake in the history of the United States." And they are retired precisely because of their opposition to Iraq.

            "The only question is whether a war serves the national interest," one retired three-star told Whalen. "Iraq does not."

Tony Judt, the NYU professor and liberal writer for the New York Review of Books, has just discovered some of the consequences of publicly criticizing Israeli government policies, as he has been doing. Here's a message he released on Oct. 4: "I was due to speak this evening, in Manhattan, to a group called Network 20/20 comprising young business leaders, NGOs, academics, etc, from the U.S. and many countries. Topic: the Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The meetings are always held at the Polish Consulate in Manhattan.

No one knows exactly how many Iraqi civilians have died from the war’s violence since the invasion of their country. The new study from public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimates that the number of those deaths is around 601,000, while saying the actual total could be somewhere between 426,369 and 793,663. Such wartime figures can’t be precise, but the meaning is clear: The invasion of Iraq has led to ongoing carnage on a massive scale.

While we stare at numbers that do nothing to convey the suffering and anguish of the war in Iraq, we might want to ask: How could we correlate the horrific realities with the evasive discussions that proliferated in U.S. news media during the lead-up to the invasion?

In mid-November 2002 -- four months before the invasion began -- a report surfaced from health professionals with the Medact organization and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. “The avowed U.S. aim of regime change means any new conflict will be much more intense and destructive than the [1991] Gulf War,” they warned, “and will involve more deadly weapons developed in the interim.”