And the winner of the Iraq Aggression is...

What does it say that every time G. Walker Bush or R. Bruce Cheney or J. Sidney McCain or the War Secretary of the day goes to Iraq, it's secretive, unannounced and cocooned by a massive security detail.

But when the nutjob in charge of Iran pays a visit to Baghdad, it's a very public, grandiose state visit.

How is this possible?

According to some, the "Surge" has made the country a near paradise. One has to ask: the country or the Green Zone?

Those who actually risk their lives to go to Iraq see a different picture than the ideologues.

So not only has this Aggression been disastrous in human terms (mostly Iraqi, of course), in terms of the physical destruction of Iraq's infrastructure and in terms of the defraying of Iraqi society, but the Aggression has destroyed our own influence and credibility (even in the eyes those we claim to have 'liberated') while dramatically increasing the influence and credibility of those we call not just the Enemy, but Evil.

Anyone with an ounce of understanding of human nature knew this was always going to be the case. But such people have not been running this country for some time.

Ahmadinejad can have a grandiose state visit. Bush has to slink in and out under cover of darkness. Does this sound anything like the portrait of a 2008 Iraq that the militarists presented us back in the day? I thought they'd be giving Bush flowers and kissing his feet.


5 years.

Over 500,000,000,000 of our tax dollars wasted.

Nearly 4000 American soldiers have lost their lives to help accomplish all of the above.

And oh by the way, an estimated 150,000 Iraqi civilians have died during the "Liberation." Some estimates are much higher. But there are at least 80,000 that have actually been documented.

What have the results been?

-The myth of a Saddam-al Qaeda link has been discredited;

-Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction, just like pre-war critics such as the much-smeared Scott Ritter and Hans Blix insisted. (You'll remember that all the 'evidence' of the WMD program presented by the militarists in 2003 dated from 1998 and earlier);

-The Middle East is now far more unstable because of the refugee crisis provoked by the Aggression;

-The number of acts of and deaths from terrorism has skyrocketed since the Aggression was launched in 2003. In fact, the rate of deaths due to terrorism has gone up ten-fold since the Aggression was launched;

-The massive flow of refugees out of Iraq into countries like Jordan and Syria demonstrates that living conditions in Iraq are more desperate than even under a genocidal autocrat.

And ultimately, this is the most damning fact of all because it represents the decisions made by people who are most affected by what the US government has done, by the forces it's unleashed. It represents decisions made by people whose lives we claimed we wanted to improve.

Millions of Iraqis have made the agonizing decision to leave their homeland because of the mess we've created.

Despite the b.s. coming out of some people's mouthes, many hundreds of thousands of people have concluded that they feel safer in an Outpost of Tyranny than in 'Liberated' Iraq.

After all this, it's clear that aside from this country's biggest welfare recipients ("defense" contractors), the biggest winner of the Aggression has clearly been Iran.

And it's even clearer who the losers have been.