Let me end this week with a message from almost 13 years ago. It was in the days after 9/11 that the neocons and their hawkish Republican allies began beating the drums to get us into Iraq.
There was no reason for it, of course. Nothing in our national history justified our attacking a country that had not declared war on us, had not committed an act of war against us.
No, before we went into Iraq, we Americans had believed since the time we were kids that the aggressors--those who started with warr--were the bad guys. I will never understand how a president so limited in his ability or sense of history as George W. Bush, a vice president as un-charismatic as Dick Cheney, or a band of un-elected ideologues could so screw this country to the wall of history as the band that ran things in the early years of this century.
We were united after 9/11. They were the ones who divided us.
They were the ones who divided Iraq into the two warring factions we see today battling for control of Baghdad. They were the ones who went into Iraq and took apart the Iraqi army, the Iraqi government, the Iraqi establishment and replaced it with a sectarian bunch primarily interested in getting even with their fellow Iraqis. Just look at the spectacle of Saddam Hussein being hanged to the jeering of a mob of Shiites engaging in something we should have no part of.
Sadly, history will make us part of this whole debacle. The people who took us into Iraq, who tied us into this blood-feud, should cease and desist from ever again even saying the word "Iraq."