Happy Anniversary! Six Years in Iraq

On the sixth anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq, after the loss of over 4,000
American soldiers since the war's ill-advised inception and over 44,000 Iraqi civilians and security forces in just over the past two years, I feel compelled to reflect on the war's (negligible) accomplishments and the devastating losses it has inflicted upon our country.

In 2003, George W. Bush convinced gullible Washington legislators and a trusting but unrealistic American public into believing that military force against Iraq was necessary following their refusal to admit UN weapons inspectors.

We now know that Bush's motive in requesting the deployment of these inspectors was to draw disturbed leader Sadaam Hussein into a state of ostensibly secretive, and perhaps implicitly belligerent, noncompliance, providing a legitimate excuse for an invasion clearly driven by ulterior motives, be they filial vengeance, petroleum prospects, or a new clientele for VP Dick Cheney's oilfield service corporation, Haliburton.

In fact, the Downing Street Memo serves as proof to the machinistic nature of this plot. Anyway, for the sake of argument, lets assume (with an unreasonable generosity) that our former president's intentions were honorable at the time of the invasion- in short that he believed Sadaam and company truly posessed Weapon of Mass Destruction and intended to use them to the detriment of the United States.

In this case, perhaps the best possible scenario for Mr. Bush, he still fails completely. His war would have been waged on a false premise, and the aforementioned casualty totals would have been the result of a trigger-happy foreign policy gaffe.

More likely, however, the ostenisble impetus for invasion (or liberation for those of you still peddling Press Secretary propoganda speech) was considerably less than honest. As the document from Downing Street attests, Bush was looking for an excuse to start this war from the beginning, and was unconcerned with the collossal impact it would have on numerous American and Iraqi families.

From a broader perspective, the war has helped villify America in the eyes of much of the Muslim Middle East, who see America as a tireless crusader attempting to extinguish their faith and culture. As peak oil approaches and markets continue to flail for feasible energy replacements for our petro-dependent society, comity with the few suppliers of what has become our most precious resource appears to be a long shot.

And what has been gained? Hopefully Iraq flourishes under a less oppressive government (it would be difficult not to improve upon the previous system), but democracies are inherently flawed, and what business or interest does the United States really have in establishing one ineffective, fundamentally fallible government for one with more obvious deficiencies?

President Obama has purported plans to withrdraw all troops from our Desert Occupation by 2011. Excellent. Too bad the damage has already been done- on many fronts.