In The Seattle Times on Friday there was a front page article with the headline "Iraq costing $100,000 per Day". And I thought - as I read about the new budget requests for the occupation and all the other requests to add more money to the military effort, "Of course. Of course it is costing this much and of course everyone is surprised. Of course they thought it would be so much less and of course this is only for a little while, this won't last long, this will all be over for us soon."

"Of Course."

The thing is, WMDs or not, I think Saddam Hussein was a horrible leader and needed to go. Just reading about what they used to do in the Soccer Stadium is enough to convince anyone of how horrible the man and his government were. I also think the Taliban are a bunch of bad people and Afghanistan needed to be free of their leadership as well.

But.

But I was a history teacher, a teacher who focussed primarily on modern war. I know how Iraq came to be, I know why that country exists with its current borders. I know there are many different tribes in Afghanistan and how they have been controlled by outside influences and random border determinations for centuries. In other words, I knew this wasn't going to be easy, not in either country, and I knew that we needed to know what the fuck we were doing and have people involved who didn't want a piece of the pie but understood the history of the Middle East and Central Asia and the Great Game.

We needed to be smart about all this from the beginning.

yeah, right.

I asked my mother once what she was doing during the Vietnam War; how she could stand to watch the body count numbers on the news every night and not feel compelled to go march somewhere or petition someone or do something. She said she was raising babies (true), being a wife - cleaning house and cooking dinner and ironing my father's work clothes. She was busy. And I was so frustrated with this response - so certain that it was woefully inadequate. And yet what did I do today? I washed a ton of clothes, read a bit of a book for my column next month, worked out (back), played with my son - watched The Rolling Stones in the Super Bowl Halftime Show.

What did I do today? I don't know.....I don't have any idea.

I'd like for someone to tell me what I should do to change the world. I have voted in every election since I was 18. I have written letters to my Congressman and Senators (and received responses). I donate money to worthy causes (The Heifer Project, The Nature Conservancy, Amnesty International, the Juvenile Diabetes Fund), and other smaller groups. I think on a large scale, a global scale, and I believe that is the way to live my life. I believe that Iraq needed help and Afghanistan needed help, but I also believe that the Balkans did and Rwanda did and Somalia did and the Sudan and on and on and on.

I believe that there are more things we as Americans do that are very wrong to the other people of this world then that are very right.

In other words, you can't just remove a government from power and expect everything to fall into place behind it. If you do that then not only are denying the history of that country, but you are denying our own history. America was born in 1776, but nearly died in 1860. And there was a whole lot of war and strife that came in between. We forget all that - we think democracy is so easy. And I'm not even talking about the 100 years of chaos that came after the US Civil War ended.

It has never been easy, not for any of us.

I sit in my house and I write about New Orleans. I write about books that I think are valuable and interesting and the world should know about. I write about a girl and her friends and dragons. I write about things that don't seem so important on the grander, larger scale that suddenly includes comments about going after Iran, about stopping their aggression (with aggression?)

I have a little life.

So tell me, what does one do today to save the world? What does someone do?