MEMORIAL

Osama Bin Laden is still out there doing his thing. (Because we stopped short of getting him in order to invade Iraq.)

The Taliban are making a come back in Afghanistan. (Because we didn’t do any of the things we promised we would do to rebuild the country and/or make it safe, partly because we had to pull troops and strategists etc. out of there for the invasion and subsequent war in Iraq, etc.)

Nothing has been done to stop Saudi Arabia (where most of the 9/11 terrorists came from) from supporting and financing the fundamentalist/radical Islamic schools for boys all over the Arab world that are the breeding grounds for terrorists and their ideology (or for that matter from oppressing their citizens, particularly women). In fact, we just made a deal to sell them, was it 20 or 30 billions dollars worth of weapons, to protect a country that was more behind the events on 9/11 than Iraq. (Because, as has been known seemingly forever, the Bush family makes a good portion of its multi-multi-millions from doing business with the rulers of Saudi Arabia.)

And once again, as in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration is refuting, ignoring, dismissing and denying the facts that their own panels and committees and agencies and etc. have come up with that say the situation in Iraq has not improved and in fact has gotten worse in many ways. But hey! Anbar Province (where Junior visited last week for a few hours in one of the most highly fortified bastions of US military might in Iraq) has seen the violence subside a little because we are now arming the Sunni insurgents who recently were bombing and killing our soldiers and marines. No news reports, that I’ve seen, point out or even notice that Anbar province contains only five per cent of the population of Iraq anyway!

I could go on, for days, for months, probably as long as this war will, but what’s the point. The troops are obviously going to stay there, some of them probably for many decades to come (ala Korea etc.) and if they by some amazing political turn around are actually all removed from Iraq any time soon (like before the 2008 election, highly unlikely) and the country splits into three separate entities, or the right wing Shiites take over, or the civil war there continues for a few years, the right-wingers will insist that the war could have been “won” if only the defeatist liberals hadn’t lost it, even if the right wing Republicans were in charge of every branch of government and agency and every aspect of the war itself (where MidEast experts were dismissed and replaced by right-wing political loyalists, sometimes barely out of college, or as in the White House and other administration strongholds, like the Justice Department, barely out of a right-wing Christian fundamentalist college.)

God bless “America.”