According to a recent Seattle PI poll, 72% of respondents (over 2155 respondents) think it's important that Saddam, or at least his body, be found. Such Internet polls are worthless, I know, but noteworthy. My own personal wannabe political stances at the beginning of the war told me that SADDAM WOULD NEVER BE FOUND, neither live nor dead. But forget my amateur armchair speculations, hear what Edward Said said on April 15 on Democracy Now!: (minute 21) "When the war started going badly in the beginning, a deal was struck, hence the sudden disappearance of Saddam Hussein and his army. [On April 6th] a convoy with the Russian ambassador was struck. On the 7th, Condi Rice appeared in Moscow, and on the 9th, Baghdad fell with no resistance to speak of. My hunch is he gave up...and was allowed to leave the country under Russian auspices, in return for which the US would get a free hand to do whatever it wants: get its quick war, declare triumph..."

"I find it difficult to believe that the army would just completely disappear along with Saddam and his people... That's my armchair speculation. I don't have any information, but the dates are beguiling... It's difficult to explain the total and sudden collapse of [the army]... an army that showed quite a bit of spunk in the south.... The whole thing suggests a political deal of a sort, and the quick turning of attention now to Syria suggests also let's not focus too closely on Iraq... "

GW is hoping the infamous short-term memory and general confusion with strange names will kick-in, and the "Saddam" of the rabid "Let's Bomb..." chant will seamlessly morph into "Assad." Hey, what's a few letters?. --Chris LaRoche

Lack of US media curiosity also extends to investigating the fate of those grandiose promises of democracy, freedom, and economic development promised if only we'd attack Afghanistan, Kosovo, Haiti, and Somalia. Each has their eerie parallels--the days after the fall of Kabul, in particular, were different from Baghdad only in that the Afghans didn't hate the Americans nearly as much. But every country now has several traits in common: a complete lack of democracy; severe economic deprivation as bad or worse than before the Americans "saved" them; and, in all but the effectively government-less Somalia, being laid wide open for global investment and privatization. In Haiti, in 1994, the US reinstalled Aristide only under the condition that Haiti become America's sweatshop, and it has; Kosovo's capital city has lost nearly half its population, searching for foreign work, in the last four years, and what's left has nearly all been privatized; the Americans' effort to put an oil-friendly puppet (Karzai) in charge are near collapse in Afghanistan as poppy-growing, carnage-friendly warlords carve up the country and fill the veins of Europe and North America's disaffected youth.

You'd think someone among the heavily budgeted networks and big dailies would take a close follow-up look at any one of these countries to assess America's lost promises--and someone, somewhere ought to be connecting all of them. Instead, neo-cons are already allowing as how maybe Iraq isn't quite ready for Western democracy just yet. Which is exactly what the Brits said in 1915. --G.P.

Closer to home, the downfall of Seattle School Superintendent Joseph Olchefske--he gave his contractually required six months' resignation notice, but for practical purposes he's history--had a lot more behind it than amazingly shoddy accounting. And most of those issues will face Olchefske's successor. The district's budget woes, discovered last year, weren't supposed to affect classrooms, but it's only next fall that they'll be biting into class offerings, class size, and teacher layoffs--because now the district's lost reserve funds can't cover this year's cutbacks in state money to local districts.

The district's insistence on happy-face, we-all-love-each-other public meetings (while the good, caring, gentle liberals sharpen their knives in the lunchroom) has fostered a culture of non-accountability that allowed Olchefske to ignore or mishandle a host of problems, until the overload of pissed-off school constituencies finally reached critical mass. Among the angry constituencies: overworked teachers and principals, gifted programs, alternative schools, school assignment policies, standardization and commercialization opponents, special needs, ESL, and racial minorities (the test scores, discipline stats, and dropout rates are incredibly racially polarized).

The school board is even more to blame--virtually none of the members, save newcomer Mary Bass, has dared to ask hard questions or offend the warm fuzzies that bloat the district's administration-heavy budget. Three of the seven school board seats are up for election this fall, and progressive candidates who'd bring the district and its new head back to reality would be a Gaia-send. (Citizens' Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools, 206-523-4922, is offering candidate training for anyone interested.) --G.P.