The Iraq War is ten years old today

George W. Bush is the worst President in American history.  In less lucid moments (mostly when hopped-up on allergy medicine) I would write that Barack Obama has been far far worse.  But there would have not been Barack Obama in the White House had Bush the Lesser been a competent leader.

I spent more time than I cared to during the Bush years chronicling and commenting upon that maladministration's screw-ups, and I sure don't want to spend any more time on it than I absolutely must (some readers of this blog have commented that I'm too hard on Obama, even "hateful".  Where were they during this site's first several years?!).  All I will say for now is this: in regards to the Department of Homeland Security: I told y'all so.  Way back in 2001 even, I wrote in a few places that Bush was giving us something in Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Agency that we would soon come to regret and that in time it would become a tool of harassment by our own government.  Clearly when an active-duty Marine serving in spite of losing both legs to an IED gets humiliated by TSA agents, something is very very wrong.

I also thought that launching a war in Iraq would be unwise and inconsiderate of the larger ramifications.  Saddam Hussein was a grade-A asshole, no doubt about it.  But however evil the man was, the Hussein regime did keep Iraq - a nation cobbled together from remnants of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I - from tearing itself apart through internecine strife and tribal quarrels.  We can blame many of the western leaders, including Winston Churchill,  for setting up that particular board and its inevitable consequences, but I digress...

The country that we insisted be Iraq could - and can - only function when there is a "strongman" figure to keep the ethnicities and sects within its borders from killing each other.  That is the role that Marshal Tito had in Yugoslavia and that is the role that Saddam Hussein had in Iraq.  Just as Yugoslavia imploded into civil war a decade after Tito's death, so would Iraq in the absence of Hussein or a successor just as brutal.  As it is, the United States sought - and claimed - the mantle of strongman over that distant land.

The war itself has cost $1.7 trillion and climbing.  Medical and veterans' benefits will have it costing over $6 trillion across the next forty years.  $490 billion is already owed to veterans.  More than 134,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.  More than four thousand American service personnel have died in Iraq.

Ten years ago we were told that Saddam Hussein was harboring chemical and biological weapons.  There were none.  Ten years ago we were told that Saddam Hussein had conspired with the 9/11 terrorists.  He had not (a theological improbability, that was: Hussein's Iraq was a largely secular state fully at odds with the goal of sharia law which Al-Qaida has sought).  Ten years ago we were told that a democratic Iraq would be the wellspring from which freedom and liberty would burst across the Middle East.

It did not do that either.  Ten years later and as the much-ballyhooed Arab Spring has demonstrated, the Mid-East has far less freedom than before.  Making matters worse is that following the departure of American forces from Iraq, that land will almost certainly become a territory of Iran.  In some ways it already is.

I understand that in this fallen realm of our temporal life that war is going to happen.  It is, after all, a product of human nature: something which beyond the mercy of higher authority is a vile and loathsome thing absent of all virtue.  My friends of more pacifist leanings are blessed with a grace to turn the cheek and look away from the strife of the realm completely.  I however do not have such grace.  Indeed, I am a historian by training: I gave up that grace a long time ago.

So it is that I am not ignorant of war and its place in this world.  But neither is war something which should be entered into on the most flimsy of rationales.  There is nothing glorious or magnificent about war.  Regardless of its cause, war is always... always... a failure on the part of those involved.  War means that a person or persons or even an entire nation can not or will not be persuaded that their actions are wrong and must be made to cease.  That the cost of their failure must now be either surrender or death.

More than 134,000 non-combatants in Iraq, men and women and children, who have died since we first attacked that country ten years ago tonight.  Perhaps it is easy for some to see the numbers and not think much about them. But every one of them was created by God and precious to Him.  Whether they perished at the hands of their own country's soldiers or inadvertently on our part, they deserve better than to be swept away as "collateral damage".

If that doesn't impinge on the conscience, consider the more than four thousand families across America who have lost a loved one in Iraq.  Those men and women, as all who serve in the armed forces of the United States, took a solemn oath to protect and defend this country and her people.  They chose to surrender years of their lives - years which could have been spent in school or starting careers or getting married and having children - to the service of others.

They did so fully aware that the possibility existed that they might be called upon to enter the theaters of war.  That doing so would place their lives in peril.  And yet they volunteered.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that this kind of personal sacrifice demands a lot more respect and even sanctity from our alleged leaders.  A man or woman who puts on the uniform and swears to serve this country is expecting that their time and effort and if need be their very lives will be utilized with deepest wisdom and utmost restraint.

That has not happened in the war with Iraq, ten years old today.  Four thousand of our best and brightest have perished halfway around the world and we've nothing to show for it.  Four thousand brilliant souls, extinguished forever from the Earth.

They deserved better.  We deserve better.

I've only heard one cause for war with Iraq that has had any scrap of fact-based rationale behind it.  It was when President George W. Bush told a crowd that Saddam Hussein "tried to kill my dad."  And yes, Hussein did attempt to do so when the elder Bush visited Kuwait in 1993.  But was that enough reason to commit billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of U.S. service personnel toward removing from power?

A few months after the invasion of Iraq, Bush the Lesser told the militants in Iraq that U.S. forces would not be dislodged.  That they were welcome to try though.  George W. Bush told them to "Bring 'em on."

This is what "Bring 'em on" looks like...

Again, maybe it's just me, but a war is too horrific a thing to justify with a personal vendetta or a temper tantrum.

The Iraq War is ten years old today.  We haven't gained a thing from it.  Lord only knows if we'll have learned anything from it either...

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Wars have consequences. Don't we know that?

My great-uncle Rob was a G.I. who served in the Pacific during World War II. But unless you were family you likely would have never known that. It was something that, like many others who served during that conflict, he never liked to talk about.

Mom told me when I was a child that Uncle Rob had to kill an enemy soldier. I didn't know until years later that it was during the American invasion of Okinawa. Uncle Rob dived into a foxhole for cover. At almost the same moment a Japanese soldier jumped inside the same foxhole.

The Japanese man said something that Uncle Rob could not understand. My great-uncle killed him without thinking. He beheaded the Japanese soldier with the bayonet of his rifle.

Uncle Rob was one of the kindest, gentlest men that you could ever meet in this world. But from a young age I sensed that he was a very haunted man. "Post-traumatic stress disorder" wasn't medical terminology until the tail end of the Vietnam War, but by then Uncle Rob had lived with it for thirty years. Until his passing in 1993 his experiences in the war would continue to linger on the edge of his memory. I once saw him go pale in the face as an Army helicopter out of Fort Bragg flew overhead.

Like I said, my great-uncle was a good man. So were the millions of other young men who went off to Europe and the Pacific islands to stand against their country's enemies in World War II. Another member of my family was already in the Army stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. He survived the war... barely. A friend of my family who died recently was one of General Patton's staff officers. I had no idea that in my friend's house, which I'd been inside a few times, there was some of Hermann Goering's finest dinnerware. Turns out that a lot of the Third Reich elites' personal items made their way into farmhouses across America, but I digress...

War is terrible. Perhaps the most terrible thing. It is an unfortunate result of this fallen, broken world that war happens. That war is, sometimes, necessary and unavoidable. But I've never understood why war could possibly be a thing to be glorified, or honored. To respect and honor the sacrifices made by those who served in war, absolutely. But war itself?

I posit that our perspective on war is a far different matter than how our grandfathers and their brothers saw it. None of them regarded themselves as "heroes" because they wore a uniform or went abroad or even because they fought in combat. They knew they had a job to do, they did it and they came back to be husbands and fathers and productive members of the community. That was enough for them. Today we have an inclination to deem anybody and everybody who wears a uniform as "heroic". World War II was a conflict where we knew who the bad guys were and we knew that we had to defeat them and we knew why they had to be defeated.

But I can't for the life of me understand how any war that America has engaged in during my lifetime has had either a definitive enemy or a definitive objective. Sometimes both.

For more than ten years we have had our forces fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. For almost two years Osama bin Laden has been sleeping with the fishes, and Al-Quaeda has been quashed more or less, yet we try to conquer a land that not Alexander or the Soviets could overcome. The Iraq War turned into a costly experiment in "nation-building" (as many of us knew it would).

America's running tab the past decade and more is now a few trillion dollars and thousands of American lives lost, when the matter of bin Laden could have been resolved easily within a matter of months after 9/11. As for Iraq well, I've written before how that country needs a "strongman" figure along the lines of Tito to hold it together and how the United States has become that strongman in the absence of Saddam, but again I digress...

I was led to write something after watching what has transpired in the past few days regarding what former Representative Ron Paul said via Twitter about the shooting death of Chris Kyle, the retired Navy SEAL considered to be the most lethal sniper in American military history...

As a longtime supporter of Ron Paul, I will admit that the former congressman exercised the wrong tact. Almost certainly an ill sense of timing. However, I do believe that I can understand what he is trying to state in 140 characters or less. Paul is - apparently - noting that war has consequences, that those who fight in war must live with those consequences... and there may even be a snide remark in there about how our system has failed many of those who come back from war.

Maybe it's just me, but war seems a horrific enough thing by nature that there should be no immediate desire to write bestselling books about fighting in one. An armed forces uniform does not a hero make. Neither should tactical operations readily produce celebrities (Alvin York being one of the few exceptions).

Anyway, Ron Paul released the following on his Facebook page later on Monday...

Paul acknowledged - and there is no reason why any person should not - that Kyle's death was sad, tragic and unnecessary. But Paul also stated that...

Unconstitutional and unnecessary wars have endless unintended consequences. A policy of non-violence, as Christ preached, would have prevented this and similar tragedies.

Now, is there anything at all wrong with this, which Ron Paul has said? Because I've read it over dozens of times and I'm not seeing anything un-American, unpatriotic or insensitive toward the memory of Chris Kyle. What I am seeing however is an uncomfortable truth: that war comes at a cost. War without meaning, far more so.

I see no reason why the former congressman should be reviled for saying what he did. Instead I have read a lot of anger and even hatred vented toward the man because... well, he strongly suggested that wars involving America can be - gasp - wrong on moral and legal grounds.

But we aren't supposed to dwell upon those trivialities, according to some. Instead we are to cheer on the war, cheer on the "heroes", forgetting that too many are coming home with wounds whether visible or not.

When a young man or woman enlists in the United States armed forces, he or she is making a sacrifice of a few years of their lives. Years that could otherwise be spent in college, falling in love and starting families, buying houses, earning money. Some even choose to spend their entire lives in such sacrifice toward serving their country.

Again, perhaps it's just me, but it seems that if any person is going to lend his life and precious time to his country and its government, that that person more than deserves to trust that his time... and perhaps even his very life... will be used wisely, be given the utmost and sincerest respect, and expended only when all other options have failed.

Those who fought in World War II paid for that understanding in grief and blood and were humbled by it. As well we should.

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U.S. soldier gets double-arm transplant (WOW!)

Whatever faults there might be with American healthcare, you have to admit: it still kicks ass like nobody else!

Retired U.S. Army Sergeant Brendan Marrocco (right) lost all four limbs to a roadside bomb attack while serving in Iraq in 2009. It's nothing short of miraculous that Marrocco is the most severely-injured American service member to have survived such an ordeal.

It's also nothing short of amazing that nine weeks ago Marrocco received a double-arm transplant at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. It will take a few more years of his nervous system getting acclimated - to say nothing of the physical therapy that'll be involved - but in the end Brendan Marrocco will have two fully-functioning arms and hands again.

From The Guardian article...

Sergeant Brendan Marrocco, 26, of Staten Island, New York, said he was anxious to return to an active life after the successful bilateral arm transplant surgery six weeks ago at the renowned Baltimore hospital.

"I feel like I'm getting a second chance to start over," he said at a news conference. "I'm just looking forward to everything I would have wanted to do over the last four years." Driving, swimming and hand cycling top his list, he added.

He lost his arms and legs in a roadside bomb attack in Iraq in 2009. "I hated having no arms," Marrocco said. "I was all right with having no legs."

Something that also astounds me: both arms were transplanted onto Marrocco at the same time. The surgery only took 13 hours to accomplish. That sounds like a very long time until one considers the complexity of this procedure. When I first heard about it, I thought it would have taken at least a full day to pull off.

Just over half a day to give a wounded soldier two new arms. A new lease on life.

Like I said: does American healthcare kick ass, or what?

(Tip o' the hat to Kristen Bradford for a terrific find! :-)

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Iraq: Well, THAT didn't take long...

I hate to say "I told you so" buuuuuuut...

For quite a long time now and most recently five days ago, I have argued that going to war in Iraq would have disastrous long-term consequences and chief among those is that without a "strongman" to hold that country together, Iraq will tear itself apart into sectarian strife. The classic model for my thesis is Yugoslavia: a "nation" that much like Iraq was cobbled together from leftover realms in the aftermath of World War I. And just as Marshal Tito kept the various factions like the Croats, the Bosnians, the Serbs etc. from killing each other, so did Saddam Hussein put a lid on the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Kurds and everyone else from destroying Iraq from within.

That's NOT any justification for Saddam Hussein, mind you. The man was an evil bastard. It's just the peculiar dynamic of any artificial nation like Iraq that it has to have a powerful central figure wielding exorbitant military force to keep the peace among the various ethnic and religious factions. That central figure was Saddam but when the United States deposed him, we took responsibility for Iraq!

(Okay, not the American people per se, but our government certainly did... and for the moment I'll let it remain an exercise for the reader as to whether our government is beholden to We the People anymore. But I digress...)

So with the United States military not even 24 hours departed from Iraq, that country's Shiite-controlled government has put out an arrest warrant for Iraq's vice-president, Tariq al-Hashemi, who is a Sunni.

Expect this sort of thing to continue to happen.

Incidentally, it was former president George W. Bush who had the "genius" idea of putting the Shiites in charge of Iraq. Some will try to blame Barack Obama for that, but there's no basis for it. And I ain't an Obama supporter by any means either. I'm just an American citizen who expects better of his elected representatives. Including a greater than basic grasp of history and culture of the places we muck ourselves up in.

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The Iraq War is officially over

On this day, the Iraq War has officially drawn to a close. It began in March of 2003, lasting nearly nine years (more than twice as long as the United States took to fight and win World War II across both the Pacific and European theaters).

The Iraq war cost our own country nearly one trillion dollars. It also cost the lives of more than 4,500 American military personnel and more than 100,000 Iraqis (many of whom were innocent civilians not attached to Saddam Hussein's army).

Now... can anyone finally tell me why it is that we went to war in Iraq in the first place? "Enforcing sanctions" won't cut it. We lost too many lives and wasted way too much money on this fiasco. What has come of it? An Iraq which will sooner than later tear itself apart across ethnic and religious lines (specifically Sunni, Shiite and Kurd) and a wide-open corridor from its western border for Iran to get pokey with Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

In short: we took an already unstable world region and primed the fuse for even worse potential for globe-rattling mayhem.

The only reason we honestly went into Iraq to begin with is because we had, at the time, a small-minded narcissist in the Oval Office. A man who only got there because of his friendships and his family connections. A control freak who was too used to getting his own way. A simpleton who had no grasp of history and yet wanted to be remembered as a "war president". An individual detached from sympathy, empathy and sincerity. A man who thought himself and was allowed to think of himself as "favored of God" and that all others as such were expendable according to the whims of his divine right to rule.

Yes, George W. Bush and all of his kind... by all means, "Take a Bow".

Future generations will look upon this conflict - and what it will eventually spawn - and accordingly rank our own era as being among the most foolish in American history.

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Former Bush official: 4000 Americans "had to die"

The lesser angels of my nature are wanting to cry out that stuff like this, is enough to make me think - however fleeting and regrettably - that if the "neo-conservatives" of this country were wiped out to a man, that this would have been a much better nation for it.

However, as a Christian, I have to fight against saying that I agree with that urge.

Frank Gaffney, former Assistant Defense Secretary and now with the "Center for Security Policy" (whatever the hell that is) declared on Hardball with Chris Matthews yesterday that in spite of the overwhelming evidence that the Iraq War was begun on false pretenses, "My position is that it’s regrettable that any Americans died. It is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die."

Here's the video...

I've thought for a very long time now that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their supporters have no sense, at all, of the value of human life. That they have no conscience or grasp of the soul like most people possess and as a result, that is why they have no regret at wasting the lives of others.

What if I or anyone else were to put a gun to Frank Gaffney's head, and blow his brains out, and then offered up the excuse that "he had to die"? What if someone did that to Dick Cheney's wife or either one of Bush's daughters? I mean, morally, it would be the absolute equivalent to what Gaffney is arguing: that people "had to die".

Who the hell gets to make that kind of judgment? How the #&@$ does Bush and Cheney and Gaffney get away with believing that God has anointed them with such power?!

Four thousand and more American families will be without a loved one this holiday season, because the psychopaths of the Bush Administration and the "useful idiots" who have backed them all this time, do not give a damn about anything but the raw, naked power they worship and make sacrifice to.

"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

-- Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings

But then, since when has wisdom been a quality of George W. Bush and his supporters?

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The photograph that will forever define Bush's legacy

And to think that all this time, George W. Bush thought that the Iraqis would throw flowers at his feet... not shoes at his head:

An Iraqi reporter threw his shoes at Bush during a press conference yesterday in Baghdad and called him a "dog". In most Mid-East cultures, showing someone the soles of your shoes is considered the ultimate - and often mortal - insult.

You know what I can't help but think about this incident? Theodore Roosevelt was once giving a speech and someone tried to assassinate him. The bullet hit something in Roosevelt's chest pocket, didn't penetrate his body at all. T.R. jumped off the podium and commenced to beating the living crap out of the assailant with his bare hands. Now how come "tough guy" George W. Bush didn't do something like that yesterday?

George W. Bush, "Liberator of Iraq", having to duck a shoe being thrown at him. Yup, that's his "legacy" right there...

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Bush Doctrine = Epic Fail

Is there anything more pathetic than a person scrambling against time in a vain effort to ensure that history will be kind to him or her?

Perhaps only if that person happens to be a current President of the United States.

George W. Bush was at West Point yesterday, trying to spin his eight years in office as a blazing success. The most foolish man to ever occupy the Oval Office actually defended his policy of pre-emptive war (something that had never been done before in American history) and declared to the assembled cadets that "With all the actions we've taken these past eight years, we've laid a solid foundation on which future presidents and future military leaders can build."

The Decider also boasted that the present condition of the United States military is ""stronger, more agile and better prepared" than how he found it when he first took office. I am somewhat reminded of how Adolf Hitler furiously insisted that entire divisions of the German army were still awaiting his orders in the waning days of World War II. If Bush seriously believes that the American armed forces are better today than they were in 2000, then either somebody should have been fired a long time ago for giving him faulty information, or there is a severe disconnect in his gray matter from reality. I suspect the latter.

So what is the result of the Bush Doctrine? The Middle East is today more destabilized than it has been since perhaps before World War I... and there is no "order from chaos" that is apparently arising. It is the legitimate opinion of many that Al Quaeda is getting stronger because Bush let its members have a safe haven in Pakistan, which as the past few weeks have witnessed has become a far greater base for terrorism than most were ready to acknowledge. Iraq is still a much worse mess than it would have been had we just left it alone, and it will be yet decades before the final cost of that fiasco is known.

I could go into his horrible domestic policies, but I've said enough of those lately already. But I will dare say that more than any other elected official, it will have been George W. Bush who most destroyed the America that we had come to know.

(And now I'm wondering how long before the loons from "that church" in Winston-Salem arrive to proclaim Bush as the "greatest President ever" like they have done recently...)

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Iraq War veteran's wounds lead to discovery of cooking

Lenny Watson was a Marine who was among the first to enter Iraq when the war started over five years ago. In 2004 he lost most of his lower jaw during a grenade attack. His drive to have something palatable to eat during his recovery ended up propelling him into the culinary arts...

The Dallas Morning News has the story of Lenny Watson's new career.

No, not gonna add any commentary here about the war, and that's not why I'm posting this here either. I do think this guy has the right attitude though: that being happy is ultimately your own choice to make, regardless of whatever nonsense life throws into your path. It's a great story, and one worth sharing with others.

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Ex-Iraqi rebels threaten a return to Al-Qaeda if not paid more

And now the dirty secret of whatever success "the Surge" had rears its ugly head...

Military.com is reporting that ex-rebels in Iraq are demanding more money, or else they will go back to the ranks of Al-Qaeda and begin attacking American forces again. The money that's been paying the former rebels to begin with has originated with the United States government.

So all this time we've either been funding an army of mercenaries that used to be shooting at American personnel, or we've been outright bribing them, depending on what your take on the situation is. I don't know if all of the diminished violence in Iraq can be attributed to this chicanery, but it's a safe bet that a big chunk of it will be.

I'm reminded again of the last phase of the Roman Empire, when that government was reduced to hiring barbarians to fill the ranks of its army and even paying off foreign tribes not to overrun the empire. Look at where that got 'em...

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Iraqi uranium: It was never a threat

Three times today I've been sent or otherwise directed to the following from Investor's Business Daily...

"Hear about the 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium found in Iraq? No? Why should you? It doesn’t fit the media's neat story line that Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed no nuclear threat when we invaded in 2003. It's a little known fact that, after invading Iraq in 2003, the U.S. found massive amounts of uranium yellowcake, the stuff that can be refined into nuclear weapons or nuclear fuel, at a facility in Tuwaitha outside of Baghdad. In recent weeks, the U.S. secretly has helped the Iraqi government ship it all to Canada, where it was bought by a Canadian company for further processing into nuclear fuel --- thus keeping it from potential use by terrorists or unsavory regimes in the region. This has been virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Yet, as the AP reported, this marks a 'significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy.' Seems to us this should be big news. After all, much of the early opposition to the war in Iraq involved claims that President Bush 'lied' about weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam posed little if any nuclear threat to the U.S. This more or less proves Saddam in 2003 had a program on hold for building WMD and that he planned to boot it up again soon... Saddam acquired most of his uranium before 1991, but still had it in 2003, when invading U.S. troops found the stuff... That means Saddam held onto it for more than a decade. Why? He hoped to wait out U.N. sanctions on Iraq and start his WMD program anew. This would seem to vindicate Bush's decision to invade."

No, it does not.

This type of uranium was never weapons grade, and was under constant seal and supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. For the most part it was leftover from Iraq's foray into nuclear power (which didn't get far) but some of it was also medical waste.

Had Saddam tried to touch the stuff to make a nuclear weapons program out of it, it would have raised red flags bigtime and everyone would have been parked on his front lawn to demand that he stop.

If Saddam seriously wanted a nuclear weapons program, he should have never invaded Kuwait. But that's another story...

Uranium by itself is not fuel for a nuclear warhead. It takes a lot of processing to make it useful as a weapon. And I don't know if Iraq had either the technical means or the expertise to have even begun to attempt such a thing.

I've spoken with a lot of people in the field of nuclear engineering in the past few days and each of them has shared similar sentiments.

I've already shared this with one friend today. As I told her then, I'm not trying to "pick an argument" with anyone. But those are pretty much the facts of the matter. And it's better to educate people about what uranium can and can't do on its own, rather than give in to fear and worse: political convenience.

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"The Surge" fails: U.S. uses air support as it takes sides in Iraqi civil war

In case I haven't articulated it already: I think that people who support George W. Bush's "Surge" in Iraq are, for the most part, idiots.

So for the past year and more we've been hearing "The Surge is working! The Surge is working!" I'm reminded of how some passengers on the Titanic actually believed beyond all rational thought that the ship was coming back up to the surface just before it took its final plunge into the Atlantic.

Those who believe in "The Surge" (sounds like a Michael Bay movie) don't care about the reality of what's going on in Iraq. If they did, they might be outraged to know that whatever success "The Surge" has boasted doesn't come from an increased U.S. military presence nearly as much as the fact that the U.S. government has been BRIBING Sunni militants to "switch sides" and not shoot at American forces.

Some of us knew it was only a matter of time before this mercenary operation failed. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon.

So in case you haven't heard already, Iraq in the past few days finally began collapsing into full-blown civil war. And the United States government is becoming actively involved on the side of the Iraqi government that it installed. Which is something that no sane leaders ever do with another country's civil war. Bush was a fool to step in and Iraq's prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was a fool to have accepted the aid, if Bush even offered it. Because if there's one thing that history has proven about civil wars, it's that outside interference always turns a bad situation into something far nastier. It will come back to bite us in the rear sooner or later.

But here's the thing about American involvement in the Iraq civil war: the U.S. is using air strikes against the Shia militias. This is pretty much equivalent to an official statement by the Bush Administration that "We admit that the Surge has not worked at all." Calling in air strikes is a very clumsy, ham-handed way to deal with a ground-based rebel force. For the faction using air support like this, it basically means that you don't care to broadcast wide and clear to your enemies that your own ground-based forces aren't up to snuff and can't win.

So George W. Bush has not only given many Iraqis who had so far been "on the fence" a damned good reason to take up arms against American personnel, he has also let it be known that "The Surge" has failed, and that the capabilities of United States military - the mightiest armed force in the history of the world - are now significantly diminished.

This past week might finally prove to be the point where it can be said that the Iraq War, at last, was the worst foreign policy fiasco of the previous quarter-century, if not longer. Because nothing has been gained, and everything conceivable has been lost because of it: innocent life, countless resources, and now the last shreds of respect for both American diplomacy and military prowess.

I don't know if we'll ever recover from this mess. Maybe we don't deserve to.

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Cheney sez: I don't care what Americans think

No doubt that a lot of the so-called "neoconservatives" will thump their chests and howl and gloat about how "their guy" Dick Cheney is thumbing his nose at those who have been opposed to his little war in Iraq.

And then there are those of us who watch this video, and we are saddened at the downward spiral that America has taken, when people like the Vice-President of the United States (and the President, remember he called himself "the Decider") can openly boast about how they enjoy the feeling of not being held accountable by anyone.

Here it is folks: your Vice-President doesn't give a damn what you think about how he and Bush are wasting American lives and resources...

The lesser angels of my nature would like to suggest that someday, Dick Cheney might be found face-down in a gutter bleeding to death and crying for help. One guy could walk past him. And that dude will look at Cheney, someone in need of dire medical assistance, then he'll shrug his shoulders and say "so?" and he'll keep on going his way, leaving Cheney to die begging for sympathy.

It would make for a great episode of The Twilight Zone. Except for a morality tale to be effective, its audience must possess a soul. Something that I don't know if Cheney and Bush and their kind ever had to begin with.

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President Bush, bereft of any concept of sacrifice, says Iraq War "worth it"

This war is five years old this week. That's a longer conflict in one small country than the United States was involved across the globe in World War II. Very nearly four thousand U.S. personnel have died... but that's only officially counting those who die within Iraq, not those who are wounded and airlifted to Germany or wherever and die elsewhere. That says nothing of the long-term emotional trauma that many of these men and women will be suffering for years to come.

And so far as the innocent population of Iraq goes, there's no telling what they've had to endure. It's already a far worse country for Christians to live in than it was under Saddam Hussein. Under him there was no persecution of Christians: now most of them have had to flee the country.

Al-Quaeda was not welcome in Iraq during the Saddam years. Today, because of this war, Al-Quaeda has no more fertile recruiting ground. Like they say on the basketball court: "Smooth move, Ex-Lax."

All of this because of a war based on a lie. It was a lie then and it's still a lie today. It's a lie whenever a country goes to war for reasons that are not morally clear. This is and always has been a politically-driven conflict. That the current administration has to resort to buzzwords and catchphrases like "the Surge" in order to build support for this war is ample demonstration that these people are more disciples of Madison Avenue than they are of Thomas Aquinas.

That there are people so deluded as to still support this administration without question might even be the bigger tragedy, because without these "useful idiots" the government would never get away with such wrongdoing... no matter who is in charge of it. But I digress...

George W. Bush not only says that the Iraq War was "worth it", but that the "high cost in lives and treasure" has turned Iraq into a "success"!

Bush has no understanding of sacrifice. He's never had to experience it. From what I've heard of the man, he's shyed away from it all his life. Things like heartbreak and grief are alien concepts to the man. Bush's disconnect from norman human emotion is probably greater than his dis-attachment from the rest of the world that you and I have to live in (the man didn't even know about the soaring price of gasoline the other week... but then since when was the last time Bush ever pumped his own gas?).

That's the only way that Bush can still want his mad little war. Had Bush and most everyone else had something personally invested in this war that they root for - like a loved one on the ground having to fight it - then his and their support would no doubt be far different. But it's easy to cheer on a fight from behind the safety of a keyboard.

We would have been far better off leaving Iraq alone, even if that meant letting Saddam stay in power. In the long-term scheme of things, his presence as a strongman over that country was a stabilizing influence, and should have remained so until the Iraqi people were ready to remove him on their own terms. That's the key thing here: it should have been Iraqis who took Saddam down, and not anyone from outside. Bush lacked wisdom to understand this in addition to any empathy toward others beyond his own ego.

From the very top on down, America is in the hands of cowards. How dare they presume to speak to us about understanding sacrifice?

Because until Jenna and Barbara Bush wear some cammies and pick up a gun and go on a patrol in Basra so that their father will know what it's like to go through the Hell that he's imposed on too many other Americans, this will be something that Bush will never know or fear. And I'm damned tired of too many people still making excuses for this pathetic man.

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The state of things ...

Or to quote Scatman Crothers's character in The Shining: "Just between you and me, we got a very serious problem with the people taking care of the place. They turned out to be completely unreliable assholes."

To wit:

- Oil today hit $111 per barrel.

- $200 per barrel is possible, says Goldman Sachs.

- The value of the dollar is plummeting.

- We are now in a recession, according to most economists.

- Some are now saying that there is a "perfect storm" brewing for another full-blown depression.

- Next week will be the five-year anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War, with no end in sight. We have now been engaged in military operations in one small Mid-East country for far longer, with no clearly defined end-goal or even rationale for our presence there, than the United States fought in World War II in both the European and Pacific theatres.

- George W. Bush desperately wants to be remembered as the President who legalized torture and government spying on Americans. If you are so foolish as to support Bush on this, remember that eleven months from now Hillary might have this power too.

- Considering that it cost one guy $80,000 and a job as governor, that must have been the greatest sex ever.

- If members of law enforcement are trying to shut down a website called RateMyCop.com because it exposes abuses they commit, does that mean that America now has "secret police"?

And finally: A woman in Kansas sat on her toilet for two years. Her flesh became meshed to the ceramic. Her boyfriend is now being charged with... something or 'nother. The sheriff in the case is named Bryan Whipple.

Only in America...

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Oil now a record $107 a barrel

Actually, as of the most recent report it's $107.44 to be accurate. And there's little doubt it will be up quite a bit again by the end of the week.

Average gas price right now around here in north-central North Carolina is $3.19 per gallon.

Why is the cost of gas and everything else skyrocketing? It's not that there's a dwindling supply as many people will argue. No, right now it's more because of the depleting value of the U.S. dollar. With diminished buying power comes high prices across the board.

And lowering the interest rates combined with pumping more Federal Reserve notes into the system is not going to do a damned thing to help matters. In fact, they will make things considerably worse by further driving down the dollar's value.

Nor will this "stimulus package" pushed on us by George W. Bush and Congress do anything. "Stimulate the economy by encouraging spending"? Feh! If President Bush actually bought his own food and pumped his own gasoline (something I doubt he has done in at least fifteen years) he would realize that for most Americans the money from the "stimulus" is going to be gone within a day, used on bare necessities like gas to get to one's job, and food for the children.

No folks, the "stimulus" by Bush and Congress is just another socialist program disguised as a cheap ploy to distract our attention while the economy falls into ruin. If these supposedly "brilliant" leaders wanted to really remedy the economy, they would (a) seriously cut taxes, (b) SERIOUSLY cut spending, which will never happen and (c) get the United States the hell out of places that it has no business being in the first place, like Iraq, which has become a drain down which $12 BILLION a month of our money is being flushed... to say nothing of the cost in human life. And again, for no reason other than the arrogance and grandeur of a few who should have never been trusted with power and responsibility to begin with.

The things that these people wanted to do and are doing was going to come at too high a price to begin with. Now we are all having to pay for it.

Maybe it's for the best. Perhaps it takes being knocked down a peg or two to come to our senses. And given the course that America is now hellbent on pursuing, maybe letting our economy fall into utter collapse will be a good thing in the long run. Lord willing, a stronger, hardier and wiser people might rise from the rubble, having learned the lessons of the folly of this current generation. If America is to yet have a bright and shining future, her posterity will be beyond false dichotomies and petty pageantry.

I still think that it's possible with this country. But if we want that for our children, we are going to have to suffer for it after having suffered fools more than we should have.

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Continuing "stop loss" shows lack of respect for military on part of Bush White House

The United States Army will continue its program of "stop loss" to keep personnel close to retirement or re-enlistment from leaving, so as to keep up President Bush's "surge" in Iraq.

Which only indicates to me that Bush has no understanding or sense of respect at all for the lives of our soldiers.

These men and women have lost enough already for Bush's private little war. Too many of them have already lost their homes back in the states, many have lost spouses. A few have even committed suicide.

And yet, the damaged little boy in the White House continues to play with their lives as if they were so many G.I. Joe dolls.

Y'know, for all the "God bless our troops" that I've seen over the past six years, I have to wonder how much not just this President, but a lot of Americans seriously value the men and women in our armed forces. Because these people offered to volunteer years of their lives - which could have been spent doing other things like pursuing career and family - to serve their country. And they did so having faith that we would honor their commitment by choosing how to wisely employ them.

Instead their lives are getting wasted. Not just in the battlefield but by sapping away at what's left to them when they come back. And yet somehow, to question this is to be branded "unpatriotic" in some quarters.

The more patriotic thing to do would be to remember that these men and women did not willingly choose to become "second class citizens" by virtue of their offer to serve, so that the rest of us could sit on our butts and wave American flags and "feel good" about blowing stuff up half a world away.

But then, we have a President who has never really been confronted with that kind of pain and death. He doesn't know. He's never understood what that's like.

We have a very foolish man, who has no comprehension of the real meaning of life, occupying the Oval Office and who believes that other people have no other purpose than to help him live out his fantasies.

Meanwhile, our good men and women in the military are being robbed of what good reality they could have made with the rest of their lives.

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Bush makes tacit admission that Iraq is about his own ego

A little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing. George W. Bush's grasp of history is downright lethal.

Here's one of the stories about Bush comparing Iraq to Vietnam, in which he made sure to use emotionally-charged words like "re-education camps" and "killing fields".

The biggest irony of that: if Bush is talking about the "killing fields" of Cambodia, then maybe it will interest him that the genocide might never have happened, had the people of that country not given the Khmer Rouge so much support following American attacks on Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge's rise to power was a direct result of American interventionism in Southeast Asia. Just as we are intervening in the Middle East today with Iraq.

But here's what also bothers me: in this same speech, Bush said that America will stay in Iraq as long as he is President.

In other words, Bush is admitting that the American presence in Iraq is not dependent on achieving "conditions of victory", whatever they happen to be at the moment. No, now Bush is making it clear that American forces being in Iraq are solely there because he wants them there, without that necessarily being in regards to the best interests of this country. This war really is about satisfying one man's ego now: Bush has actually come out and said it.

Meanwhile, 14 American soldiers are dead in a helicopter crash in Iraq. And the mother of one soldier who died in Iraq is asking "I want to know why I'm planning a funeral while George Bush is planning a wedding."

And one California family is mourning the death of their second son in Iraq.

I very strongly doubt that Bush, or any of this war's supporters, have shed any tears of grief for those lost in this conflict of theirs. They really can't look past their own egos and see the very real individuals who are dying for no reason at all in this senseless war.

Yes, I wonder too why Jenna Bush and this beau of hers haven't volunteered to serve in Iraq. I mean, if this war is about freedom, then it seems as though they would want to do their part in securing it, doesn't it?

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... Then maybe America doesn't need saving at all

Stu Bykofsky, a writer with the Philadephia Daily News, is seriously suggesting that the best way to "save" America is to have another attack like 9/11.

Two months ago, a Republican party official also said that America needs to be attacked again so that people would appreciate President Bush.

If "saving" America means not only anticipating, but openly hoping for the deaths of innocent people, then America does not deserve to survive at all.

I mean that.

Here is the biggest problem that I have with these self-styled "neoconservatives": they believe that America's strength is supposed to be in material wealth and military might. They don't give a damn about the value of individual life. How else can they sincerely consider it to be "good news" when it's reported that the death toll of American military is the lowest in several months... and not bother to ask themselves if even one life needlessly lost because of this fiasco is one life too many.

These people don't care if others die for America. So long as they aren't the ones having to do the fighting and the dying.

If America is a country where the many are deemed to be expendable assets for the betterment of the few, then that America does not merit survival. If we are ceasing to be a people that values the life of the individual and the rights that God has bestowed upon him or her, then there is no longer anything inherently good in America at all. Certainly not worth fighting or dying for.

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Bush's "war czar" wants to consider a draft

From Breitbart.com...

Bush War Adviser Says Draft Worth a Look

Aug 10 06:25 PM US/Eastern
By RICHARD LARDNER

WASHINGTON (AP) - Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush's new war adviser said Friday.

"I think it makes sense to certainly consider it," Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

"And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation's security by one means or another," Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June ...

I will gladly support a draft. Provided that Jenna and Barbara and George P. Bush are the first to get inducted and put on armed patrol duty in Basra.

Or better yet, George W. Bush should suit up and take up the rifle on his own and set an example for the rest of us to follow. If Leonidas could lead 300 Spartans against two million Persians, certainly our own Commander in Chief can take point in his "surge" against a few dozen militants ... right?

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