JWN’s third blogiversary

Has it been three years already since JWN’s inaugural post?
It has indeed.. And what a three years it has been… Most of it, alas, dominated by the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Back in February 2003, I could still hope (though I knew it was a long shot) that war might be averted. But in those days the warmongers of Washington were riding mighty high! Why, they even had Colin Powell doing their bidding there in the Security Council!
They bent him to their will… They invaded Iraq… They tried to bend Iraq’s people to their will… And, as we now know, they most spectacularly failed in that.
Bush and Cheyfeld still seem to live in a bubble of unreality– from “Mission Accomplished” to “Plan for Victory” to “Heckofajob, Brownie”. But in actual fact, reality has clipped their wings a lot, and continues to do so. Perhaps a more equitable, humane, generous, and rule-abiding international order will emerge from all this. I pray to G-d it will.
Meanwhile, I don’t even want to start to think how many hours I’ve spent here on JWN. The blog has 1,280 posts on it, a total of 10,630 comments (with now, only a small proportion of them being spam), and in an average week people from some 7,500 distinct IP addresses are these days checking in to read it.
So thanks for being there, readers vocal and silent. If nobody was reading this, there would have been almost zero point in doing it. I might, of course, have done something more productive with all those hours. But all in all I’m really glad I’ve done it. Onward and upward, eh?