Ben’s Musings

Here are some extracts from this must-read article about the war:

These are the numbers out of Iraq: 616 American soldiers killed, 18,000 medical evacuations of wounded American soldiers, 102 non-American coalition soldiers killed, more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 billion spent. There are no numbers available for the Iraqi civilians wounded.

These are the numbers out of the Bush White House, first put forward by George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union Address and which remain even today on the White House website: 26,000 liters of anthrax in Iraq, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin in Iraq, 500 tons of sarin and mustard and VX gas in Iraq, 500 tons being 1,000,000 pounds, along with 30,000 munitions to deliver these agents. None of this, not one little bit of it, has been found.

This is what the numbers say: Every reason put forth to justify the invasion of Iraq has been proven to be either a wretched exaggeration or an out-and-out fabrication.

When Bush came in promising democracy to Iraq, the Shi\’ites rejoiced because they are the majority, and the basic one-person-one-vote principle of democracy pretty much guaranteed that they would get to run the country. Unfortunately for them, the Bush people never actually intended for democracy to take root in Iraq, because they knew the Shi\’ites would use democracy to elect a fundamentalist regime with ideological ties to Iran and then throw democracy out the back door.

This, in the end, is the ultimate failure of George W. Bush and his people. There were no terrorists in Iraq before the invasion, but they are there now.

There is no simple solution. An immediate withdrawal will set the stage for an incalculable slaughter in an Iraqi civil war, more terrorism against the United States, half a dozen more wars in the Middle East…Staying in Iraq, conversely, will bring us more dead and wounded American soldiers, more dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, more terrorism against America, and billions and billions more dollars poured onto the sand.