Of course, there are quite a few "shouldas," "couldas," and "wouldas" in the last couple of decades of US-Iraq relations. Yes, we now know that going to Baghdad at the end of the first Gulf War would've saved us the entire last year of agitation. Saddam's 1993 assassination attempt on a former president of the United States, if you ask me, should've been cause for regime change right then and there. And, as I've learned from Kenneth Pollack's book "The Threatening Storm" (which I'm trying, in vain, to finish before the war starts), there were many within the foreign policy apparatus of the Clinton Administration (including, of all people, Al Gore) who actively favored regime change as the best solution to the Iraq problem, but didn't dare pursue it since they knew it lacked the will of the American public- a will that would suddenly materialize, as we now know, on September 11.

Regardless of how one feels about the Iraq situation (and by now, I'm sure, everybody's got an opinion), there's little denying that the past six months of stalemate have been an unmitigated disaster. There's still a chance that a war in Iraq could accomplish all of its objectives: the elimination of the threat of Saddam's weapons, the establishment of democracy in that country, and later elsewhere in the Middle East, and perhaps most importantly, an actual bright future for the Iraqi people. But the course taken by the Bush Administration since last fall has not only put the entire world at a standstill, but has sacrificed American credibility both militarily and diplomatically.

To paraphrase the "Clerks" character Randall, "it's time to shit or get off the pot, Mr. President."