Power on a Platter -- Iraq's Irony -- the genius of Frank Rich NYT editorialist. Frank Rich's column -- link below is brilliant.

I am stunned by the utter ineptitude of our government, the gullibility of our people, and with a volunteer military, I wonder occasionally about the men who signed up for a mission they did not scrupulously analyze which could and did get many singularly killed. Iraq was and still is a war waged with few sharing its burden. If a nation goes to war then an ENTIRE nation should go to war and not simply sit back like an audience in a theater and watch the fireworks in absentia like a Fourth of July celebration gasping in shock and awe of every blast. People were on the other end of those blasts and MOST of our lives were NOT on the hook. Most made little to no sacrifice for our war. How corrupt is this Great Gatsby nation to allow that barbaric orgy of the killing fields of war for no reason as we sipped our Starbucks while another nation was being hammered by the wrecking crew?

If I were married to a man, had children with him and he signed up for service in Iraq I would split a gasket in anger. How dare someone relinquish the most important duty a man can have and that is to the children he MADE by risking his death in a war he was not compelled to fight and which rationales for that war were dubious at best and false at worst!

If I were a man and was utterly outraged by 9/11 I would have made DAMN sure that the response to that event was insightful, smart and made with overwhelming evidence as to why my nation was going to war against another. If I were a man ESPECIALLY with a family I would NOT abrogate my obligation to them and further would not sign up to kill another man UNLESS there was CLEAR evidence that country had DIRECTLY attacked my nation.

I admit, during that time, to the fury I felt at the Trade Center/Pentagon attack and Shanksville, PA Flight 93 crash. It was not until later that I saw how much in error and how destructive to our national security our nation's war with Iraq in particular, our Middle East strategy in general and, indeed, most all of our post WWII foreign entanglements have been. I did not see it because I did not look. I did not look because I simply bought the lies my government spewed, I wanted revenge and my government said it had the goods on Iraq. It CLEARLY did NOT and NOW I am angry at those leaders who made such catastrophically bad and deceitful policy which cost thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis lives, displaced four MILLION people, ruined infrastructure, utterly fractured the Middle East and cost us ONE TRILLION, yes I said a TRILLION bucks. How's that for deficit caring Republicans? I heard few if any of them screaming about that!

We have committed tremendous destruction and atrocities on a nation which did nothing to us! Moreover, the US handed power on a platter to Iran which now has nearly free reign in the chaos of that troubled region and worse Iran soon will have nuclear capacity of its own and no one is in a position to stop them. But CLEARLY the most troubling consequence of our Iraq war is a destabilized Pakistan. Pakistan is a fragmented mess with thousands buried in floods and mud up to their neck. The Taliban and Al Qaeda seem to be the only ones ready to capitalize on the chaos driving the rig to extricate people headed for the mud pits of the abyss and, guess what? Pakistan, in fact, has REAL nuclear weapons. The destabilization of this country has put its people near a stage of civil war with real nuclear weapons in its arsenal. If civil war breaks out where WILL those weapons end up? Who knows. One hopes NOT in the hands of Al Qaeda or the Taliban which would love nothing more then to bestow a gift upon us in our own backyard!

Why did we perpetrate a war called Iraq? We did it for revenge and because we could. We did it for our military industrial base which lines its pockets with the blood of OUR soldiers and the blood of another nation's people who posed no imminent threat to us. We did it to destroy countries, governments, human beings and civilizations wily nily for profits of oil. We did it to set an example to the world of our military might. We did it for ALL those things and now we are reaping what we have sown in the Middle East. We are like those whom we waged war upon, as Frank Rich said, in his insightful editorial, at war with ourselves, angry, divided, fragmented, sad and bankrupt. Ironically, we are the mirror image of the very nations we sought to change and that is EXACTLY what some in that neck of the woods wanted. Frank Rich got this irony completely correct on every point. His insightful article is linked below.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/opinion/05rich.html?src=me&ref=general