Making Up For Yesterday

Somewhere back in our family trees, I'm related to these guys.

That video never fails to bring a tear to my eye.  Thing One was about the same age as that kid when I first saw it, and their name is Hawes for crying out loud.

Today we finally end the Iraq war.  In the course of an almost nine year war, 4487 American service members died and 32,226 were wounded.  The collateral damage to the lives of literally countless others will take decades to fully comprehend.  The financial cost of the war is about $1,000,000,000,000.  When you start to count that high, who really knows.  Three quarters of a billion were directly poured into Iraq, at the very least.  How many Iraqis died?  No one really knows.  How messed up is that?

What was accomplished?  Iraq got rid of a dictator.  Even money says that they will have one again in the near future, although the Arab Spring suggests that maybe they won't or that it won't last long.  But unlike Egypt or Tunisia, Iraq has been traumatized by almost a decade of relentless violence and before that 15 years of devastating sanctions.  The country of Iraq is fundamentally messed up, and we did a lot of it.  As the Moustache of Understanding put it, we "took some little country and threw it up against a wall just to show we could".  And we broke the hell out of it and killed a lot of people - theirs and ours - to do it.

USA!  USA!  USA!

Pardon the expression, but you can't unshit the bed.  Obama did as well as he could to get us out of there, and if he's re-elected I trust he will draw us out of the other, longer quagmire in Afghanistan.  It's worth remembering that no single event more contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union than their long misadventure in Afghanistan.  Remember, "Never get involved in a land war in Asia."

As we look at our weak economy, think of what a trillion dollars would have bought here.  Think of the schools and public spaces refurbished.  Think of the smooth highways and fast rail.  Think of the public wi-fi and gleaming new power grid.  Think of wind farms and solar farms.

Think of that little boy crying in that video.

Vietnam happened because people in Washington just let us drift into a situation without giving it the proper sort of thought.  Kennedy and Johnson thought too much about the domestic politics of looking soft on Communism.  Iraq happened because people in Washington directly took us unto a situation without giving it the proper sort of thought.  Ask Eric Shinseki, who did give it the proper sort of thought and got fired for it.

If it hadn't been for Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson would be ranked amongst our greatest president.  Tens of thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese would be alive today.  But the Bush Team had the lessons of Vietnam to call upon, but they insisted on their ability to "create their own reality".

It is difficult to mark a more egregious act of folly in my lifetime.

I hope - and I know this sounds vindictive and I don't care - I hope that Bush and the rest of his cronies are visited in their dreams by the relentless ghosts of the people whose lives they destroyed.  I hope they age prematurely under the crushing burden of knowing they sent so many people to early graves, that their decisions were ultimately no different than if they had loaded the gun, put it against someone's head and pulled the trigger themselves.

They are stupid and evil people, and if we lived in a just world, they would be in prison for their crimes.

But at least we're closer to a day when videos like the one above won't be so common.

Peace on earth, goodwill towards those with whom God is pleased.  And that can't possibly include Bush, Cheney and the rest of the war criminals who ran our country for eight years.