Has It Really Been 1000 Days?

Shock and awe: today I am shocked and awed by the hubris and incompetance of the Bush Administration. Not that today is all that much different from any other day since the Bushists started to self-destruct.

A thousand days ago, on 20 March 2003, the US and British armies started a campaign which ended a few weeks later with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

It seemed so easy. President George Bush announced that the war was over. The American mission had been accomplished. Months passed before Washington and London realised that the war had not finished. In fact it was only just beginning. Of the 18,000 US servicemen killed or wounded in Iraq, 94 per cent have been killed or wounded since the fall of Baghdad.

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So many unintended consequences of this war of aggression have gone under-reported: Saddam overthrown, Shia's loyal to Iran gain power in Iraq as a result; US previously opposed Human Rights violations, now chooses to redefine the word so that it can torture human beings and otherwise violate basic rights; weakened by his alliance with the US, even Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's vote-suppressing goons couldn't prevent victories for 50% of the Muslim Brotherhood candidates running for office; Syrian President Bashir al-Assad's cooperaton with the US in Iraq has weakened his rule to the point where Iraq's neighbor to the West may soon plunge into a civil war of it's very own; European, Middle Eastern, and Asian opinion polls show a surge in anti-American sentiment; no WMD were found in Iraq, but since the illegal invasion we know Iran has stepped up efforts to build The Islamic Bomb -- thanks, Dubyah, that's just what we needed.