Five Years On

Today marks the five year anniversary of our invasion of Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John McCain travelled to Iraq to mark the occasion and show everybody how swell everything is going. Unfortunately, their trip was disrupted by a car bomb that killed thirty and injured another fifty. There are, lets face it, a certain percentage of the population who will support this war no matter what and will cling to any faint ray of light as justification for a brutal and immoral invasion. There is little you can do with those folks. They are like the members of America's Communist Party that denied Stalin's atrocities. They are true believers. Excluding those folks though, lets review.

The war has cost us 4,000 American lives and over $1 trillion dollars.

At least 100,000 Iraqis are dead. Four million Iraqis are misplaced, two million have left the country.

Our conduct of the war has strengthened the hands of our enemies as the number of people around the world who do not think we are who we say we are has grown.

One country that was a potential threat-- Iran -- is now looking at Iraq like a yuppie looks at a brand spanking new suburban subdivision. They are already debating where to put the sconces and plasma TV.

By adding thirty thousand additional troops we were able to lower the level of violence in some pockets of Iraq. Of course we also agreed to some deadly deals with Shiite militias to do so. But what are a few thousand Sunnis in the scheme of things?

Had enough yet?