Five Years On

Five years have now passed since President Bush ordered an unprovoked attack on Iraq, and there is still no end in sight. All the publicly-given reasons for the invasion have been proven false: no WMDs, no 9/11 role, no al Qaeda connection.

Amid the blood and chaos, the statistics are sobering. Just under four thousand American soldiers have been killed. More than fifty thousand have been wounded, many grievously. More than half a trillion dollars have been poured into the sand, with many billions going to fatten the bottom lines of war profiteers such as Halliburton, Bechtel and KBR. Many more billions have vanished into the pockets of corrupt Iraqi generals and politicians.

As for the Iraqi people, the ones for whom we supposedly embarked on this grand crusade to bring freedom and democracy, that's not going so well. The Red Cross reports that after five years of largely botched reconstruction projects, most Iraqis lack regular access to clean water and sanitation, that doctors are fleeing the country before they can be kidnapped or killed, and that electricity supplies are spotty at best. The United Nations estimates that as many as five million people - about one-fifth of the population - have fled their homes, either to other parts of Iraq or other countries altogether.

And the civilian death toll? No one really knows, and neither the Americans nor the Iraqis seem at all interested in finding out. Estimates range from 82,000 to as many as one million, but it could be anywhere in between.

Of course, the Decider and Darth Cheney continue to live in their own world, where up is down, black is white, and Iraq is a shining beacon of freedom. "Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision," Bush continues to insist, even with all that has happened.

Depressingly, he still spews the same phony talking points which have been proved a thousand times over to be lies, wishful thinking or simply nuts:

• "Operation Iraqi Freedom was a remarkable display of military effectiveness."
  
• Reality: Any realistic post-war planning was wholly unwelcome.
• "When the Iraqi regime was removed, it did not lay down its arms and surrender. Instead, former regime elements took off their uniforms and faded into the countryside to fight the emergence of a free Iraq."
• Reality: The Iraqi army largely surrendered without a fight, then was disbanded and cut off against the advice of just about everyone, thus creating a ready-made armed and angry insurgency.
• "And then they were joined by foreign terrorists who were seeking to stop the advance of liberty in the Middle East and seeking to establish safe havens from which to plot new attacks across the world."
• Reality: All estimates insist that the insurgency consists almost entirely of Iraqis with only a few foreign fighters, the majority of them being from Saudi Arabia.
• "We have captured or killed thousands of extremists in Iraq, including hundreds of key al Qaeda leaders and operatives."
• Reality: The real al Qaeda, the one run by Osama bin Laden, was not operating in Iraq before the invasion. The group calling itself "al Qaeda in Iraq" is composed almost entirely of Iraqi nationals and is unconnected with bin Laden.
• "We sent reinforcements into the country in a dramatic policy shift that is now known as 'the surge.' General David Petraeus took command with a new mission: Work with Iraqi forces to protect the Iraqi people, pressure the enemy into strongholds, and deny the terrorists sanctuary anywhere in the country. And that is precisely what we have done."
• Reality: The stated objective of the Surge™ was to give the Iraqi government "breathing room" to achieve something resembling political progress. Even Petraeus agrees no such progress has taken place and that the Surge™ has failed miserably.
  

Once again invoking 9/11 to justify attacking a country which had nothing whatsoever to do with that terrible event, Bush said that to leave Iraq "would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and make it more likely that America would suffer another attack like the one we experienced that day."

For his part, Cheney is just as deeply in denial, blithely claiming that "it's been well worth the effort" and still darkly hinting that Iraq was behind 9/11, long after such nonsense was debunked repeatedly. Not surprisingly, he also doesn't care that the American public is demanding a pullout:

Martha Raddatz, ABC News: Two-thirds of Americans say [the Iraq war is] not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.
Cheney: So?

So much for democracy, it seems.

And the war just keeps going on.