They disbanded the military, and it sounded like a bad, bad idea. They fired all the Ba'athists, even though people sort of had to be Ba'athists to get government jobs, and that sounded like a damned bad idea. When I saw the looting on television, it was obvious that there was going to be no solution. The people in charge weren't up to the job, one that shouldn't have been done in the first place. The kidnappings, the forcing of hijab, the mass executions, the bombings, the ruined healthcare system, the destroyed economy, good gods, one thing after another followed on and it never gets better.

Everyone can talk about pressure and accountability all they want. Iraq has no government. Iraq has only anarchy and corruption, murder and theft. The artifacts of a proud and ancient civilization have been destroyed and the children of a modernized society dragged back to the Stone Age, kicking and screaming through the blood of their loved ones.

I can't even keep track anymore of the number of times that some picture or story from the hell on earth that Bush has made of that country has brought tears to my eyes. I can't even remember how many times I have cursed my inability to do anything about it besides rail at the unending bloodlust of the war criminals sitting in the White House. But the streets I walk on are quiet and safe, and my neighbors never try to shell my house, and I never have any particular reason to worry about discovering that a car bomb or missile bombardment has made me the only surviving member of my family. It's beyond guilt at this point, knowing that I've somehow been a party to this and yet escaped the murderous consequences, and I don't even know what to call it.

The situation in Iraq has been a shrieking, unyielding horror for years. It's been a funeral every day that you read the news, and if you don't read the news, you don't even have to look anymore to know that it was another funeral. Probably a lot of them.

At the beginning of the war, the first few months, I think, I saw a picture of an Iraqi baby. Eyes closed peacefully in a beautiful little face with a sweet mouth, but nothing left above the forehead, where the skin was hanging loose over what was left of its skull. It was the most evil thing I'd ever seen in all my life. Not the way Pat Robertson wants people to think evil is, the way you have to teach someone, where evil is something you've been trained to hate. But evil in the way that makes your soul shrink and your whole body feel nauseous, because something dear and hopeful has been turned into an abomination.

It will be terrible when we leave. But it's terrible now, and it will be terrible if we don't leave for another decade. Because we're the problem; not wanted. Some things, like that baby with its head half blown off, can't be fixed with more bombs and bullets and bullying.

There is a terrible reckoning coming in Iraq.  The delusional fantasies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the neocons have made that inevitable.  It has been inevitable at least since General Shinseki was fired for suggesting that it would take several hundred thousand troops to maintain order in post-Saddam Iraq.  The list of political and military blunders this administration has committed then and since will occupy historians for centuries to come.  To suggest now that anyone else is responsible for the disaster the Bush admnistration and its neocon enablers have made for themselves is just another symptom of their sociopathy.

For every Iraqi who has died since American troops crossed the Kuwaiti border, for every American military man or woman who has come home dead or broken from that misbegotten misadventure, for every Iraqi woman selling herself in some Jordanian or Syrian refugee camp, their blood and their shame is on the hands of George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle and Bill Kristol and all the rest of the neocon fantasists who sold us their evil fantasy.

Have I ever told you about my poor memory?

By the way, the Johns Hopkins/MIT estimate of the dead in Iraq that used to be over 600,000 that you mention above was recently updated to just under 1,000,000. Of course the Right still refuses to acknowledge any number of innocent victims of our occupation, but that's where the number stands.

Blue Meme just posted a great analogy:

So Dubya actually wants us to draw parallels between Vietnam and Iraq now?

Fine.

Here's one: refusing to concede the obvious didn't do Texan Lyndon Johnson much good. He handed the quagmire off to his successor, but Johnson was forever tarred with his tragic mistake.

Well said.

Let's just say that you are an adult.
Not everyone, least of all those who have had a savage psyops burn pulled on them, is as willing to face the facts.
I will leave it at that.
While I mourn!

"Coach Leary, walking on water wasn't built in a day" -Kerouac

available in orange.

The next step is to start pressuring Iran to return POWs and MIAs.

Then if Americans won't get worked up over Iraqis, maybe they'll get worked up over American POWs and MIAs still held in captivity.  There's a major entrepreneurial opportunity waiting out there for some wingnut.

50 states, 210 media market, 435 Congressional Districts, 3080 counties, 192,480 precincts

SEPTEMBER 15 2007  Washington DC    MARCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The "bloodbath that ensues" is extremely unlikely to be as bad as the four and a half year bloodbath that has resulted the U.S. presence, and probably will not last as long. One of the reasons for that is that once the U.S. has left, and taken its death and destruction machines with it, no one who is still in the country will have the capacity to exceed the deadly and destructive capabilities of the Americans.

In any case, as long as the Americans remain, there is simply no chance for anything to improve. On the contrary, as the last four and a half years have demonstrated, as long as the U.S. is there, things will continue their escalating downward spiral.

Only when the Americans are gone from the scene will there ever be a chance for things to begin to turn around. It won't happen immediately, but at least there will be an opportunity for it to happen.