"Moving day" is always a misnomer. Sure, there's usually a day and time when all of your worldly possessions are transferred from one location to another with much blood, sweat, and tears (although some people choose to prolong the agony and do the migration in stages, something I've done on multiple occasions and sworn I'd never do again), but the actual moving hardly ends there. Various odds and ends always need tidying up, even if you're fortunate enough to have movers doing the heavy lifting, as my wife and I did this time around - on our former landlord's tab, no less, a rare act of generosity from a mostly despicable cross-section of humanity. And the little things you didn't want to bother the professionals with often take more time to gather up and transport than the bed, the dressers, and the oversized Rubbermaid containers egregiously overloaded with kitchen "essentials". Our movers were done, paid, and off to their next gig by one o'clock in the afternoon last Tuesday, but we were still hauling bags of random bits of three years' habitation down the stairs and cramming them into the hatchback of our tiny but tireless 1994 Ford Aspire until the late, late hour of 10 p.m., when the old apartment had finally been scoured of our presence, more or less. Then we had to unpack. Our new home has a lot going for it, but despite the fact that it has an upstairs and a downstairs as well as a second bedroom (and two bathrooms!), I think it may actually be smaller than our previous residence, and it remains an ongoing effort to try and find space for everything in the new digs, especially our combined collection of book, which made up at least half of our moving bulk, if not more. There are emotional and psychic dimensions to changing your address as well. But that's another story. Right now I have some more of my life to unpack.

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Former CIA director James Woolsey said Wednesday that the United States is engaged in World War IV, and that it could continue for years.

Did I miss something? What happened to World War Three, or is that what we're calling the Cold War now? I must have not gotten the memo.

The fallout continues: another diplomat - Ann Wright, deputy chief of the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia - has resigned in protest over the war in Iraq. I'm glad to see at least that America's diplomatic corp has the strength of its convictions to say and do what they know to be right. If only our spineless elected representatives of the House and Senate could do the same.

You know, the more I watch events in Iraq unfold, the more and more this situation is looking like Athens' ill-fated Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War, a war which cost her the support of many allies and signalled the beginning of the end of her imperial reign. The Athenians had been lulled into thinking that Sicily was ripe for the picking (grain was to the ancient world what oil is to the modern, making Sicily the Middle East of the Mediterranean) and would be no match for their naval power (the pre-industrial version air power, naturally); and so on a thinly-veiled pretext (the plea of the Segestans to liberate them from the tyranny of Syracuse, which at least was more plausible than our "ticking bomb" preventive war doctrine against countries that allegedly have weapons of mass destruction in their putative arsenals), the Athenians set out with a fleet of over 100 warships and 20,000 infantry to conquer the entire island, over many objections both abroad and at home (including that of Nicias, the statesman who ironically was ultimately chosen to lead the expedition, think Colin Powell and his recent 180-degree turn on the doctrine of force protection and the importance of diplomacy). Never mind that the experts had warned that most Sicilians would resist an invasion (despite the fact that Syracuse was the local heavy, it was still a Sicilian heavy, and not some imperial outpost of a foreign power - the same reason that is being offered for the unexpected Iraqi support of Saddam Hussein, of all people), and that Syracuse, even if taken, would be next to impossible to hold (just like many are claiming about Baghdad now, given that the Republican Guard and the fedayeen have demonstrated their willingness to use guerilla tactics and urban warfare to oppose American and British forces) - the most important objection to the Sicilian Expedition is that such a naked act of aggression would set the entire Greek world against Athens, and tip the balance of Greek geopolitics in favor of Athens' arch-rival Sparta (although some would say that the French are our new nemesis on the world stage, I think the analogy here is the growing anti-American coalition of nations that are dismayed at the United States' refusal to consider them as equals in matter of diplomacy and absolutely horrified at our unilateral warmongering. No hegemon exists without a counterbalance naturally coalescing to oppose it; and the harder that hegemon pushes, the stronger the counterforce will in the end push back). But the Athenian demos was not swayed by such realistic assessments, and chose instead the counsel of Alcibiades, the infamous opportunist who saw the conquest of Sicily as the springboard for an extended campaign against the Italian peninsula and thus assuring for all the time the supremacy of Athens over the Spartans and her Dorian kinsmen (cf. Richard Perle and the neoconservative agenda for the Middle East - first Iraq, then Iran, Syria, et al., until it's all either in our hands or remade into U.S.-friendly puppet regimes that will ensure our dominance and our empire). Hampered by unfaithful allies, a lack of cities revolting to their side, and poor supply lines (sound familiar?), the Athenian invasion ended in disaster, and set into motion a chain of events that lead to her comeuppance at the hands of Sparta and myriad other aggrieved Greek peoples...

God damn it, doesn't anyone study the Classics anymore? I guess our diplomats do.

Please, oh please, someone tell me that someone hacked the New York Times' website, a la Al Jazeera. The American military can't be this stupid (or can they?):

Army Depots Have Names of Oil Giants

By NEELA BANERJEE

The subtleties surrounding the sensitive role oil plays in the Iraqi war may have eluded the United States Army. Deep in some newspaper coverage yesterday was a report that the 101st Airborne Division had named one central Iraq outpost Forward Operating Base Shell and another Forward Operating Base Exxon.

The Pentagon shrugged off concerns that now might not be the time to mention the names of foreign oil companies on Iraqi soil. "The forward bases are normally refueling points — they're basically gas stations in the desert," a Pentagon spokeswoman said. "Whether or not we're going to lecture everyone that, due to political sensitivities, you should be careful what you call your gas stations, I don't know if that's something that should be done or would be done."

Make dinner, not war - fixating on Iraq in a 24/7 manner has gotten me thinking about Iraqi cuisine. I know nothing about it, which disturbed me somewhat, given that I am passionate about food in general and love to learn about what people eat around the world and figure out how to cook it in the comfort of my own kitchen. Googling "iraqi cuisine" wasn't extremely helpful here. Aside from an interesting anecdote about the Jews of Baghdad and their importation of a pizza-like dish called lahma bi ajeen, which is comprised of ground lamb and spicy tomato sauce baked atop yeast bread, the consensus seemed to be that the Iraqis didn't have a real cuisine of their own, and relied on a lot of recipes that were actually Iranian or Kurdish in origin. There is a lot of hankering for grilled foods in Iraq, from skewered meat to local fish, but being that the urge to barbeque seems to be one of the great culinary universals for humanity (cf. Steve Raichlin's The Barbeque Bible for an epic whirlwind tour of grilling around the globe), it's hard to call that something unique to the modern-day inhabitants of Mesopotamia.

But there may be hope for the Iraqi table, after all (that is, if there are any tables left in Iraq when we're through with them). Nawal Nasrallah has just written a 664-page tome called "Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and a History of the Iraqi Cuisine", which is available through Amazon.com. Unfortunately there isn't a review or description of the book, but it sounds like a timely addition to my already overloaded cookbook shelf. Too bad all my credit cards are maxed out...

Imperialism is not easy. That's the lesson our budding Americo-fascists (if Andrew Sullivan can coin "Islamo-fascism" as the great boogeyman of the 21st Century, then I'll say that the Americo-fascism which has festered in response to it is an even greater danger to the stability of our Republic and the world at large) learned over the weekend, as their breathless cheerleading of the war against Saddam was tempered by the very real possibility of a protracted guerilla war in regions supposedly "taken" over the past six days of blitzkrieg through Southern Iraq. I'm starting to think that the Bush administration oversold America on the idea that the Iraqi state was a house of cards that would topple with ease if Saddam and his sons were taken out of the picture. They even sold themselves on this idea, and hastily changed their battle plans at the last second and with no prior warning to their Coaliation allies to open the war with a "Hail Mary" airstrike intended to kill the ruler and his inner circle at the very outset of hostilities. The problem with this thinking is that it oversimplifies the true nature of the apparatus which has maintained a decades-long reign of terror in Iraq. Saddam's police state has myriad individuals who have benefitted enormously from oppressing the masses at the regional and local level, and consequently these people have an awful lot to lose in the event in "regime change". At best, they'd lose their livelihoods if Saddam were overthrown; at worst, they'd be tried and convicted as war criminals or lose their lives in a spate of revenge killings. And though I seriously doubt that such resistance will cost the United States the war, it will sour the sweet taste of victory. Already we're being warned by the same people who promised us a cakewalk to Baghdad that the road ahead may in fact be long and difficult. The more cynical of us already suspected as much, but would the American people have been so eager to sign on for this war if they had known that the Iraqis weren't just going to roll over and let us in, as many honestly believed they would do, once we'd shown them a little bit of "Shock and Awe"?

Warblogging is not easy, either. Nor is finding your way through the morass of data that this war is generating. I've found the following websites to be extraordinarily helpful during these extraordinary times in getting the information that American news organizations (at the behest of the Pentagon, yes, but also out of their own self-motivated fear of reprisals from "Middle America", and others who don't like to mix critical thought with their nightly news) are keeping us from:

Unlike their American counterparts, BBC reporters "embedded" in the field have been allowed to keep running blogs, which don't seem to be as censored as what goes out into the radio and television reports. Here's a daily roundup of all those posts. Kvetch all you want about the "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation", Andrew Sullivan - the BBC provides one of the best English language news sources on the planet, and the world would be infinitely poorer without its much-needed perspective.

As for getting a radically different take on what's going on in Iraq right now, why not try Venik's Aviation, a Russian site that takes military analysts, radio intercepts from the Middle East, and other data being gathered from the conflict and attempts to peer through the "fog of war". Note: This link was working fine this morning, but now as I'm testing it out as I write this blog, I seem to be getting a server error.

And for a running commentary on all things Left, there is the indomitable Eschaton, which is updated frequently and furiously by Atrios.

I hope you find the above sites as useful as I have in keeping a grip on my sanity over the past few weeks!

Welcome to your life
There's no turning back
Even while sleep
We will find you
Acting on your best behaviour
Turn your back on mother nature
Everybody wants to rule the world
It's my own design
It's my own remorse
Help me to decide
Help make the most
Of freedom and of pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world
There's a room where the light won't find you
Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
When they do I'll be right behind you
So glad we've almost made it
So sad they had fade it
Everybody wants to rule the world
I can't stand this indecision
Married with a lack of vision
Everybody wants to rule the world
Say that you'll never never never need it
One headline why believe it ?
Everybody wants to rule the world
All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world

I finished Chapter Two of the novel - which now stands at about 12,000 words - this evening, on the bus ride home to Lynn. It's a glorious mess, but I have some ideas for taking it apart and reassembling it in a more coherent fashion when I finally get around to the second draft. In the meantime, however, it's full steam ahead, although I did take a break after finishing the chapter by starting a short story that I recently got a flash of inspiration for, about the Curse of the Bambino (a topic near and dear to my heart, as a member of Red Sox Nation). I was surprised at how well the first few paragraphs came out, so now I'm going to be torn between continuing on with Chapter Three or pecking away at my new story. Now this is the kind of trouble I wish I'd always had as a writer!

The most frightening thing I've seen in years: CBS morning news personality and "Big Brother" host Julie Chen dressed in fatigues, reporting from an undisclosed location in the Persian Gulf. This whole embedding (how creepy is it that "embedding" is a managerial term as well, as I reported last week after our monthly library staff meetings. I can't wait for Donald Rumsfeld to start talking about "low-hanging fruit"!) of American journalists with military units is a joke. I have no problem with propagandistic puff pieces during wartime, but for all of the major news organizations based in the United States to pull their independently operating correspondents out of the war zone and rely solely on embedded reporters - who aren't allowed to tell us anything the military doesn't want us to know - while other countries' press, including the Brits mind you, are still alive and reporting from downtown Baghdad says a lot about the sorry state of the American media. At least during the first Gulf War we had CNN sticking it out in Iraq when the bombs started falling, while all of the other news agencies allowed themselves to be sequestered and handled by the Pentagon, who spoon-fed them a steady stream of generic "smart bomb" footage and precious little else.

Random thought: Is it just me, or does anyone else expect to see a Jawa sand crawler in the distance, whenever we cut to the "Live From The Iraqi Desert" footage?

I've decided to root for the Kurds during this war, especially after hearing the news that Turkey has authorized its troops to make a foreign incursion into Northern Iraq so that they can secure the Kurdish territories and prevent the birth of an independent "Kurdistan", a rider to the Turkish Parliamentary resolution allowing the Americans the right to fly through Turkish airspace (which is a far cry from the original plan, which would have allowed the U.S. to send ground troops into Turkey in order to attack the Iraqis from the north) that got virtually no press here in America. A pity, because the Kurds have gotten the shaft so many times during the past few decades, and really deserve a homeland of their own at this point. The Turks should know better at this point, too, having spent the last few centuries trying to screw its former Ottoman subjects out of their fair share of rightful territory, only to be forced to spend decades afterwards fighting until they have to give up everything they should have in the first place, and then some. Greece is the perfect paradigm here. The Ottomans did everything they could (as did the Western powers) to ensure that an independent "Kingdom of Greece" would be a rump state, a mere fraction of the Greek-occupied lands, and a tiny sliver of the whole Greek-speaking Eastern Mediterranean. As good an idea as it seemed to the Ottoman Porte at the time, the Greeks immediately made it their business to add to their artificially small nation, until Greeks and Turks ended up going to war on and off again for the better part of a century. Mark my words, the same thing will happen with the Kurds, unless Turkey wises up and lets the Kurdish people have what should have been theirs many, many moons ago.

Is Saddam dead? It's entirely possible, following a surprise opening salvo from our side that sought to catch and kill the Iraqi leader in one of his bunkers. Is it legal to specifically target another nation's head of state, war or no war? No one's questioned the legality of the attack, as far as I know, but there's no doubt we'd be howling bloody murder if Saddam tried to do the same thing to our capo. The idea of whacking another country's leader with a Tomahawk missle or a bunker-busting bomb is just a little too Tony Soprano for my tastes. Speaking of guys named Tony, apparently our "Coalition of the Willing" partner Tony Blair wasn't too happy about our attempted hit, either, of which he wasn't informed until the deed was done. Poor English war hawks. They really thought we cared about them, didn't they? All the Brits did was provide a thin veneer of multilateral respectability until the bombs started falling, at which point we started treating them like the rest of the world - come along for the ride if you'd like, but don't think for a second that your opinion really matters to us.

"Begun this clone war has."

Coalition Members of the 1991 Gulf War:

Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Honduras, Italy, Kuwait, Morocco, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Turkey, The United Arab Emirates, The United Kingdom, and the United States.

"Coalition" Members of the (soon to be) 2003 Gulf War:

Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.

It's an impressive list that the State Department has cobbled together to prove that we're about to unleash the dogs of war all by ourselves. But aside from the notable absence of Arab and "Old European" countries on the 2003 list, there's another important (read as: HUGE) difference - the 1991 Coalition was a truly international military force which had been assembled to enforce the almost unanimous will of the United Nations, whereas the 2003 "Coalition of the Willing" is merely a list of nations that are willing to be associated with the United States and the United Kingdom as they prosecute a unilateral war of aggression of questionable legality.

But it's good to know that Albania is there for us. Uzbekistan, too. The best part is that Colin Powell revealed to the press today that not only do we have the "Coalition of Former Warsaw Pact Members and Soviet Republics" cheering us on, but fifteen additional nations who'd prefer to remain anonymous at this time. I'm not exactly sure how this would qualify as support, particularly moral support, but hooray for the Unknown Allies! A question, though - if any of these countries end up sending troops, will they have to wear bags over their heads?