January 12, 2005

Dear Mr. Bush,

Your search ended today, empty-handed in the desert, the same as it began. There were no weapons, no smoking guns, buried there beneath the sand. There was no truth the words that you spoke so forcefully two years ago; no reality behind the bluster and promises of "mushroom clouds" and "imminent threats."

There's a part of me that wishes you did find something, Mr. Bush. A part that hoped that this wasn't all meaningless. There's a part that has woken up every day since you began your war, thinking that perhaps I would read that everything was true, that in the stifling desert heat there was a secret bunker filled with nightmares and demons, just like you said. Because if it was true, then it would give some sort of a purpose to the lives that have been lost, the dreams shattered, the chaos that has erupted throughout that poor country.

But instead it's all hollow. We spent two years in the desert chasing a fiction you created just to get us there in the first place. Two years chasing our tails; two years tracking phantoms. And because of it, a whole country is burning. For nothing.

Tilting at windmills,

Dan