This was written in response to an opinion by a local writer. The subject: Was the Iraq War worth it? He was, I thought, quite correct by saying no and stating why. I responded with a blog entry.


I could NOT have said it better. Lloyd Kaye is 150% correct. The presidency of George W. Bush, the worst in US history, did more to SIGNIFICANTLY hurt this country after 9/11 than any other president has perpetrated at any other time in our history. One wonders when our disastrous foreign adventures will ever stop. No, Lippy, the non-questioner supreme, it was NOT all about oil but it was PARTLY about oil. The other parts of the insane policy are endemic to US foreign policy which simply does not know when to quit, does not calculate risk, does not care about innocent lives -- OURS OR THEIRS, does not, with all the supposed prestigious institutions of learning, know how to read history and understand the culture of the nations it invades and give thought to policies which kill, maim and destroy. It does so using modern day blitzkrieg notions and overwhelming force. Why? Because it can.

Another part of the equation was, of course, George Bush's puerile mentality as he sat through too many western movies (when he wasn't drunk) which made him swagger and think if America or the president does it it must be right and HE, after all, was the president. He sure showed his daddy and Jeb what a man he truly was better than at any other time in his sorry life. He was going to seek revenge for 9/11, wage preemptive war on a people who did nothing to us and was STUPID enough to be convinced by NeoCons and Dick Cheney that he would remake the Middle East into a Jeffersonian democracy. They told him he would be remembered as liberator supreme. Instead he got a shoe thrown at him. We have paid the HEFTIEST price in blood and treasure. Worse, Arab memory is not short.

Our policies often take advantage of our geographical good fortune and run amok dropping bombs, napalm, and yes, even some gas on anyone who gets in the way of its manifest destiny, shining city on the hill and empire. Well, those bombs, bullets, defoliation, torture, displacement and other disastrous consequences of war like the killing of innocents may NOT be etched in our memory but they are etched in those we hit.

I HOPE the president is correct and the arc of history bends toward justice. So far I have seen little. I await a punishment visited upon those who perpetrated this horrendous folly, gargantuan mistake, lies and evil. The lives lost, the countries ruined, the export of Al Qaeda, the displacement of refugees, the civil war STILL being waged, Pakistani restiveness with its nuclear threat and the infusion of Iran with power it did not have before are simply SOME of the astounding consequences. The balance of power has been shaken. The crimes Bush/Cheney regime have perpetrated are crimes against humanity as grave and serious as any which have ever occurred. The path of history should be made right, the arc should bend toward justice and the guilty should be held accountable.