No one can guarantee that any course of action in Iraq at this point will stop sectarian warfare, growing violence, or a slide toward chaos. If current trends continue, the potential consequences are severe.

Let me paraphrase. "Stay the course" is calamitous, and there is no sure alternative that can bring anything resembling a victory.

And that's on page ix. (Or "ix-nay," as I'm sure the Bush administration will refer to it.)

So now it is official.

Shortly after 9/11, this incompetent administration began the drive to Iraq. Within days, they were attempting to link Iraq to Al Qaeda. The 9/11 attacks, perceived by the rest of us as a terrible and egregious affront to the American way of life, were perceived instead by the administration as an opportune development to justify the plan they already had, for invading Iraq. ("Woe is me," went the thinking in the White House... "but how serendipitous!")

The Iraq invasion was never justified. The war in Iraq was a distraction from, not a front in, the War on Terror. The war never furthered American interests. Saddam did not have WMDs. Iraq represented no threat to Americans. Iraq had no ties to Al Qaeda. Iraq did not greet us as liberators. Democracy is not thriving there. For the average Iraqi, life is actually worse now than under Hussein. Everything George Bush and his administration told us about Iraq was in error, a lie, or both. Some of us knew that all along, and we were called traitors.. But nNow it is as obvious as a bad hairpiece.

And yet, even days before the mid-term election, President Bush and his compatriots had the nerve, the gall, the temerity to tell Americans that we had to "stay the course" until we "won" in Iraq (what constitutes victory, we were never told); that any suggestion otherwise constituted "cut and run," and that to question the administration's stay-the course mentality was to embolden terrorists, and was therefore treasonous.

President Bush had the nerve to challenge the patriotism of all of us Americans who questioned his ill-fated Iraq boondoggle, who did not and do not stand with him in this mess.

Now that group numbers well over half of all Americans, including most senators and congressmen. And now, we see, it includes the members of the Iraq Study Group.

Before we all suck it up and pitch in to dig our way out of this horrendous no-win mess that George Bush, Condi Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and their coterie of arrogant neo-con screw-ups have gotten us into, I think it is fair to ask the president, in much the same way that Army lawyer Joseph Welch asked Joe McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Because I'm not going to soon forget that the president called me a traitor for seeing the folly of his actions, where he could not.

Yes, as Americans we will fix this un-fixable mess. But I'd like to think there is some measure of accountability. That's all I'm saying.

Labels: The politics