Another Year
Tonight in the US , March 20th in Iraq, marks the fourth anniversary of the official invasion of Iraq. Of course, we now know that Special Forces teams went in earlier and the air forces of the US and Britain had been doing some “pre-emptive bombing” prior to the missile attacks on possible locations that the Shrubbery’s intelligence services [as opposed to the CIA, NSA, DIA, and the regular intelligence groups] swore contained Saddam Hussein.
For those who have short-term memory problems: Iraq did not have WMDs and, as a result, was not in violation of UN Resolution 1441. The UN weapons inspectors were forced out of Iraq by the actions of the President of the United States, not the President of Iraq. The “intelligence” was selected to support the desires of the White House, not the reality on the ground.
Every problem encountered in Iraq was anticipated, but the warnings were ignored. After four years we are further away from anything that might be considered winning than we were on the day before the war started.
Tens of thousands of innocent people are dead. The infrastructure of Iraq is in tatters. More countries than at any point in our history consider the United States a threat to the world. We are throwing a massive debt onto the shoulders of our great grandchildren. Our military is on verge of breaking, if it isn’t already.
What does it take to get the government to acknowledge that enough is enough?
4 comments
They’d have to stop twisting facts to fit their neo-con world and take a hard look at the reality of the situation. But this administration, and many Republicans as well judging by the polls, aren’t willing or able to deal with facts as facts. Their focus is justifying their continuance in office and will do whatever it takes to support their actions, facts be damned. They have no desire to govern. They just want the power and are too myopic to realize that their very actions are corrosive on so many levels.
Frankly, Alice, they are ensuring that people will never trust them with national security again. The concept of cutting your losses requires the admission that you are losing, and I’m not sure they can understand reality any more.
Not tens of thousands of innocent people. HUNDREDS of thousands of innocent people According to HWR et. al., the U.S. invasion of Iraq has killed more civilians in four years than Saddam managed to kill in the entire 25 years of his reign of terror.
But we must keep clapping, clapping I say, for victory!
Well this penguin, for one, tired of clapping long ago…
– Badtux t he Clapless Penguin
(Yes, I’m aware of the double entendre :-0).
I sort of figured that you would double any entendre, it’s the code of teachers to stay awake while trying to teach people who don’t want to learn.
I used tens of thousands to avoid trolls, but it has to be in the range of 500,000 based on after action photos in Falluja and Tel Afar. You can’t hit a place like that without running up those kinds of casualties when you factor in the increased deaths from the loss of infrastructure.