George W. Bush will live in infamy for what he has done in Iraq. 161 dead. 83 dead. 53 dead. 16 tortured. 17 decapitated. Shiite doctors dumping the bodies of Sunni patients they have murdered. Burn marks. Executions. Torture chambers. Revenge killings. Family members shot in front of their wives and children. These are all the headlines from Iraq in just the last couple of days.
If this isn't a civil war, what in the world is? Anywhere from 50,000-650,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the last three and half years. Let that sink in for a second. That's a gigantic number. The human toll in Iraq has been unspeakable. And none of it had to happen. This was a war of choice. And it has been one of the worst choices ever made by a world leader.
George Bush now threatens to go from one of the worst leaders in US history to one of the worst leaders in world history. Iraq had allowed the weapons inspectors back in, they were doing their job, Iraq had absolutely no weapons of mass destruction, the United States military was doing a fantastic job of containing Saddam Hussein, there was no sectarian hostility in Iraq, there was stability in the region - and we came in like a bull in china shop and turned the whole country upside down. For what?
Democracy? Conservative pundits are now saying the Bush administration is considering replacing the Iraqi government. What? I thought they had a democracy. I thought that was the noble mission (of course, I didn't really think this, but that's the bullshit they've been feeding us all this time and the press has dutifully written down as if it had any merit in fact).
No WMD. No connection to 9/11. No democracy. No stability. Nothing accomplished but a horrible, unspeakable civil war. We ought to cover our faces in shame for what we have done to Iraq. Yes, it was us. There was no civil war before us. There were no Shiite militias. There were no death squads. There was no insurgency. We broke it, now we own it. To make excuses and to blame the Iraqis at this point is revolting.
George Bush has done the impossible - made Saddam Hussein's reign in Iraq seem not so bad by comparison. When you manage to make Saddam look good, you can't go any lower.
I could go on busting him up all night long and listing the crimes of omission and commission in Iraq, but any way you slice it, the point is inescapable. We started a war in a country we had no business in and it has now spiraled out of control. We have blood on our hands. And we have a leader who is criminally negligent and barbarically clueless.
And at this late juncture we have a president, vice president, Joe Lieberman and a Republican Congress who say they would do it again. Think about the madness of that statement. They would do it again.
If that doesn't send a chill down your spine, you have no feelings left. Somewhere between 50,000-650,000 dead, some of them in the most brutal ways imaginable. For absolutely nothing. And they would do it again.
If you vote for any of these guys again, you are one hundred percent guilty. You are voting for men and women who say they would make the same horrific choices again. They have warned you of how unimaginably callous and barbaric they are - and if you vote for them again, you are no better than they are. This is a democracy. What our leaders do, we do. If we break it, we own it.
Now, it's up to you. Are you going to send these guys back in to make the same mistakes they promise to make again?