Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Fifth Anniversary Observations

The best place to go is Juan Cole:

"Five years of Iraq lies:" How President Bush and his advisors have spent each year of the war peddling mendacious tales about a mission accomplished.

I posit that each year of the war has been characterized by a central lie by the Bush propaganda machine.

Year 1: "There is no guerrilla war."
Year 2: "Iraq is a model democracy."
Year 3: "Zarqawi is causing all the trouble."
Year 4: "There is no Civil War."
Year 5: "Everything is calm now."

I also suggest that John McCain is pushing for:

Year 6: "Total victory is around the corner."


Read Professor Cole's essay here if you want to feel smarter about all of this.

Me, personally? This is really the fifth anniversary of the war? Never would have believed it. Never would have guessed that what seemed like a lean and mean smash and grab that wouldn't last very long would have ensnared us in a quagmire of this magnitude. Our allies have abandoned us and fallen by the wayside. Our Veteran's Administration is understaffed, underfunded and overwhelmed. You would have been laughed out of the room if you had said we would have this many troops in Iraq right now. I was in uniform five years ago today. I was, thankfully, in a unit that wasn't in danger of deploying and I was, more thankfully, able to get the hell out of the military without being stop-lossed.

Well, here's the legacy of the Iraq war--our military is now a hollow shell of what it was, and untold hundreds of thousands of lives have been changed forever by the carnage. We need change in this country and we need the war to end as soon as humanly possible.

I mean, really. What more is there to say? Anything else is just delusional.

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