Columnist – John Sammon
This is to formally claim victory for all those who opposed the war in Iraq. You’ve been vindicated. The bad guys, those who supported the war and especially the war criminals Bush and Cheney, who are walking around free because Americans lack the backbone to admit wrong, have been proven wrong.

Obama’s statement that Iraq resulted in “no victory” and that it’s time to “turn the page” is a bitter-sweet moment for those few souls who dared to oppose the war in the heady first days when everybody was for it because Bush and Cheney foisted the lie that Iraq was connected to the 9-11 attack.

Bush himself later admitted this was false.

In the pro-war hysteria, crazy clueless Americans were driving around town with American flags pinned to their car antennas in what you would have thought was a holy crusade. They’ve been proven wrong, but they won’t admit it.

Iraq was an unnecessary war fought for the sake of falsehoods.

We set Saddam Hussein up in business by befriending him and equipping him and encouraging him. We only turned on him when he refused to be a good puppet. He was a bad man but he was our bad man.

The lie that he had weapons of mass destruction and that he planned to use them on America and that an attack on America was eminent………this was simply a device to gain support for the war.

Thus, we set the stage for our own fiasco.

Bush knew if he told the truth, that Saddam has no weapons, but he’s a bad man and a bad puppet who won’t take orders from us, and this is our chance to grab his oil and re-make the Middle East, so we’re going in. He knew if he told you the truth, you’d be less likely to support the war.

So Bush concocted a lie. The American people went for it, and many still believe it. This is the hopelessness. Truth is not a factor in American life.

The Iraq War cost 4,400 American lives, thousands of wounded and thousands more with post stress disorders, squandered the world image of the US as a civilized nation, killed a million Iraqi civilians in what amounted to a genocide, and poured blood and billions of dollars down a hole which was enough to push the American economy over the edge into the abyss.

American joblessness has never recovered from this and perhaps never will.

In a sickening display of throwing alleged values out like the baby with the bath water, Bush and Cheney also set up a gulag of overseas camps in which prisoners were held permanently without trial, initiated wiretap spying to find “bad Americans,” and abandoned the Geneva Convention by instituting torture.

I, like other Americans, had to sit by and watch them do it, and get away with it.

This also proved that Richard Nixon was ahead of his time. Not only did we not learn the lesson of Watergate, we actually went on to prove that the Constitution itself is practically meaningless without people to defend it, naked in the face of corporate gangsters who take advantage of Americans’ docility and dumbness.

Iraq diverted attention away from Afghanistan, allowing Afghanistan to fester, and making success there less likely. Even a close-minded Republican might at least have the intelligence and decency to admit that pursuing two wars at the same time is fundamentally unwise. But you won’t hear that, because Republicans are prisoners of their own skewed dogma, and never saw a war they didn’t like.

For all the blood and billions spent nation building, electrical power stations in Iraq sitting idle that we built, falling apart from neglect, abandoned. For all this cost, we achieved an Iraq wracked by fractional disputes, corruption and hopelessness, a welfare state totally dependent on American guns to prop it up.

NO VICTORY!

What then is no victory? It’s not exactly defeat. It’s somewhere in between. For a war to be successful you have to win.
If you don’t win, then add up the cost.

Was it worth it? Many will still say yes. That’s the biggest problem of all.

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