Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

I have a bit of an inside angle on the advice the President received and rejected. My best friend was a Near Eastern Studies major at Princeton and the fathers of two of my closest high school friends were professors of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. And it wasn't just egghead academics that told the President he was nuts to go into Iraq. His father told him, people like Pat Lang told him, Colin Powell told him.

Listen up Bush. You haven't liberated shit. You haven't brought freedom anywhere. You brought garroting and suffocation and forced rape and waterboarding and kidnapping and beheading and truck bombs and amputees and brain damage and carnage on an untold scale and attack dogs and mass graves and one lie after another and illegal domestic surveillance of peace activists and the basic denial of due process to American citizens and a fiscal crisis and less health care, worse schools, lower paying jobs, staggering corruption, and extravagent wealth to defense contractors and speculators in gold.

You need to leave office now. And you need to ask for forgiveness. And you need to pay a price for your crimes.