I'm not sure who thought St. Patrick's day was a good day to declare war, but it happened anyway. After a nice meal of corned beef and cabbage (along with traditional Irish drink), a mid-afternoon matinee and return to the homestead, the paper told us the Prez was going to speak.

All happy thoughts pretty much stopped there. I knew what he was going to say. Our Prez rarely talks because he wants feedback (maybe never), so it was pretty clear--they weren't going to get their way at the UN, so they were just gonna do it. And that's pretty much what he said.

Saddam and his entourage had 48 hours to get out of the country or face war. Anyone who's been following the news for the last year or more knows that Saddam ain't gonna leave. This is his swan song. Even if he knows in his heart he's going to get killed, this isn't going to stop him from fighting to the last. No dictator wants to be taken down alive. None of them want exile. None of them want to face whatever "court" they'd have to face for crimes they committed (prosecution coming only after they've fallen from power).

Believe it: Saddam and almost everyone else connected with the ruling government in Iraq is going to die or disappear. This was never a question. This has been the foregone conclusion for quite a while.

Since the speech, I've been numb. I've been trying to not pay too much attention to the newspaper full of statistics, diagrams and pictures. Oh sure, there are stories, too. He said, she said letters from both sides of the war debate (Newspapers love war! Newspapers are leftist! Where are the stories about the pro-war demonstrators? Where are the stories about the anti-war protesters?). Children's simple letters to soldiers in the Gulf. Bulletins about where to send all of your extra Girl Scout cookies.

I have seen a few basketball games. It's the easiest thing to watch and try to pretend we aren't blowing up a country halfway across the world. The Lady Lobos staged a huge comeback Saturday night to win their first NCAA tournament game in history. Most of the top seeds are winning, even if they have to fight hard to do it. In a way, watching the NCAA is like watching the war. We kind of know how it's going to come out, but we want to see it happen anyway. I don't listen to the commentary for the most part, so I'm not sure if they're describing the games in terms of war or not. But it would be perfectly legitimate to do so. It's all about getting good penetration, swarming defense and hitting those targets.

Today, though, I felt like I should get caught up on it. The news for the first few days was so positive, using the "shock and awe" phrase way too much, talking about this thing being done in a matter of weeks. Trying to get us to buy the claim that the US isn't going to occupy Iraq, "Just Liberate It!"

Of course this is going to take a while. The last gasp doesn't take a few seconds, it takes months. When you've been fighting all of your life, why would you suddenly give in at the end? And, of course, once all of the main fighting is over, we're going to have a constant, if not oppressive military presence. The time of reconstruction will dwarf our attempts at diplomacy by a factor of ten. If you can even claim we tried diplomacy.

I am heartened by the protests of U.S. citizens. Every day since the war started there have been marches, protests, honk for peace stations. I haven't seen this kind of concentrated outpouring of protest in my lifetime. The Gulf War had sporadic, but not very forceful protests. I wasn't really paying attention to anything outside my house at the end of the Vietnam war.

The world at large is doing the same thing. Encircling our heavily guarded embassies, coming up with interesting effigies to burn.

And, just as the Prez said would happen, a lot of the world's governments caved when we started bombing. I'm not sure what this says about everyone else's governments, except they probably thought they'd lose some of our subsidies if they stayed in opposition.

We are paying tens of countries tons of money to make sure they support us. In the meantime, our economy is in the shitter. We are on constant alert and this close to being under martial law ourselves. We've reached the limit on our government's international credit card, and Bush thinks a tax cut for the rich is going to solve all of our problems.

I wish that our government would spend as much time, money and energy fixing our problems instead of finding bombing ranges for all our new military toys.

Until then, we've got a new reality TV show running on most of our networks: Are we entertained yet? We'd better be--we're paying for it.

Matt Worley's bunker's have been shelled, but he's holding strong.