The Unpaid Bills of the Iraq War

All you Iraq War cheerleaders should go read this whole post from Charles Pierce.--SS

The Unpaid Bills of the Iraq War:

If you don't count the contractors, and the embassy the size of Rhode Island, the fact that an awful lot of non-Iraqi someones are making a buck over there, and the long, bloody folly of it lodged in our historical memory like a kidney stone, the Iraq War pretty much ended on Wednesday with the president's speech at Fort Bragg. Or, at least, events were arranged so that whatever happens in Iraq henceforth can be more conveniently ignored. As the ever-essential Marcy Wheeler points out, Rand Paul tried to end the war officially a while back and two-thirds of the Senate voted against him, and the war never will truly be "over" until the authorization to start it in the first place is expunged from the law books.

We owe some terrible bills over this. We owe them to ourselves, for letting ourselves get duped and fooled by a passel of profiteers and geopolitical magical-thinkers into a war that we kept saying, over and over again, that we didn't want. We owe them to ourselves because of the ongoing wreck we've made out of the constitutional order. (If it weren't for the Iraq war, torture wouldn't be a topic for Serious Discussion in this country.) We owe it to ourselves because, confronted with the crimes and savage maladministration that led us into this mess, we have resolutely declined to hold any of the criminal bastards who perpetrated it responsible for their offenses against this nation. That's why they're out there on Fox, telling everyone how terrible it is that their pet war is allegedly coming to an end. To borrow a line from Bruce Springsteen, to thousands of dead and wounded servicepeople, and their families, and for turning the name "Walter Reed" into a synonym for dysfunction and neglect, we owe debts no honest man can pay.

We owe some terrible bills to the world for blundering around like a blind ape with a bazooka in the most volatile section of the planet. We owe them to the world for...

Seriously. Go read the rest. And all you people who said I would be toast anywhere else for opposing the war, well, you'd be toast anywhere else for supporting it. Instead, you're out there doing your best to elect another rich asshole who will cut taxes on the rich, run up the deficit, and put another trillion dollar war on the credit card.--SS