On the Fifth Anniversary of the Iraq War, It's Mourning in America

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin

Editor and Publisher

March 19, 2008

Such is the state of our long national slouch into anesthetic delusion that the fifth anniversary of a war in Iraq that is nearing 4,000 American dead is buried on America’s popular browser due to the "pressing" story on the more tender sensibilities of an "American Idol" judge.

It’s supposed to be the smart political thing to say that the surge is working, but only if you are the kind that thinks everything is hunky dory between the Israelis and Palestinians. The surge is nothing more than a political/police action/bribery of faction leaders Band-Aid to lower the death count until the Bush Administration ends and a new president has to deal with the disaster.

It’s widely known in urban areas with drug problems that if a particular neighborhood has a lot of shootings, the police send in tactical units and patrol it heavily for awhile. Of course, the carnage and narcotics activity subsides for awhile and the police departments announce the success of their effort. But all they have done is temporarily halted an endemic problem.

It is estimated that anywhere from 100,000 to one million Iraqis have died as a result of the Iraq War, and that three trillion American tax payer dollars will be spent on the NeoCon Bush-Cheney folly.

That didn’t stop happy-go-lucky George W. Bush from declaring that the Iraq War was well worth it on the occasion of its fifth anniversary:

Five years after launching the U.S. invasion of Iraq, President Bush is making some of his most expansive claims of success in the fighting there. Bush said last year's troop buildup has turned Iraq around and produced "the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden."

"The challenge in the period ahead is to consolidate the gains we have made and seal the extremists' defeat," he said in excerpts the White House released Tuesday night. "We have learned through hard experience what happens when we pull our forces back too fast — the terrorists and extremists step in, fill the vacuum, establish safe havens and use them to spread chaos and carnage."

Of course, Iraq didn’t have Al-Qaeda in its borders until Bush created the vacuum and chaos that allowed them to enter the country – and still they account, by Pentagon estimates, for less than 5% of the "insurgency" in Iraq (with most of that small percentage composed of volunteers from Bush’s good buddies, Saudi Arabia). At least 95% of the people killing our GIs in Iraq are – well – Iraqis. And in polls in the Washington Post last year, the vast majority of Iraqis wanted us to leave their nation, and a majority sympathized with the insurgency.

But Bush is as happy as a pig slopping around in the mud.

And Dick Cheney made a "surprise" visit to Baghdad to declare the war a "success," as nearly 50 people were blown up in a suicide bomb. Cheney also repeated yet again the repeatedly disproven, by his own military and intelligence services, claim that Saddam Hussein had a connection to Al-Qaeda:

''This long-term struggle became urgent on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. That day we clearly saw that dangers can gather far from our own shores and find us right there at home,'' said Cheney, who was accompanied by his wife, Lynne, and their daughter, Elizabeth.

''So the United States made a decision: to hunt down the evil of terrorism and kill it where it grows, to hold the supporters of terror to account and to confront regimes that harbor terrorists and threaten the peace,'' Cheney said.

"Understanding all the dangers of this new era, we have no intention of abandoning our friends or allowing this country of 170,000 square miles to become a staging area for further attacks against Americans.''

Just last week the White House suppressed another Pentagon report that concluded there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the terrorists responsible for 9/11, but Cheney’s only real skill is in sustaining alternative realities.

Then there’s John "The Mad Hatter" McCain who was doing a sort of baton pass visit to Baghdad, only to twice confuse the Shiites with the Sunnis, which indicates that he is as ignorant as Bush, who apparently didn’t know the difference between the two groups at the time he invaded Iraq.

Oh, and Cheney told the troops that the Iraqis are learning to love us. What does he think, that they are masochists to his sadism? In fact a recent BBC Poll confirmed more or less what the WP polling found last year: most Iraqis don’t have confidence in the U.S. Military.

So, it’s the Fifth Anniversary of a grim milestone in American history: a war without end, run by incompetent leaders who reside in "Neverland."

It’s an occasion for mourning in America, not celebration.

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG