Who'da Thunk It?

So Iraq's all fucked up.  I was going to hang the word "again" on the end of that sentence, but when I look at almost any reporting from that part of the world in the last year or 30, it gets pretty clear that the joint is practically never un-fucked up.

Somebody please tell me how we managed to ignore every warning about how something like this was bound to happen if we went in there and started knocking shit down - warnings that came from all those damned dirty hippie libruls, going all the way back to about 1990.

And it's not that it wouldn't have happened anyway - guys like Saddam always end up stepping on their own dicks eventually - it's just that we wouldn't be standing here holding an empty bag.

We didn't get the oil, we didn't put any holes in al-Qaeda (cuz al-Qaeda wasn't fucking there until we showed up - duh), and we didn't get any strategic positioning worth a good goddamn.  But we did get 4500 dead uniforms and we got 15,000 maimed to the point of being cripplingly dependent on dope or a stoopidly inadequate VA healthcare system or both, and we got maybe millions more with varying degrees of PTSD and assorted other Invisible Wounds which means we could have thousands of human time-bombs walkin' around here in USAmerica Inc just waiting for something to set 'em off.

From WaPo:

IRBIL, Iraq — Insurgents inspired by al-Qaeda rapidly pressed toward Baghdad on Wednesday, confronting little resistance from Iraq’s collapsing security forces and expanding an arc of control that now includes a wide swath of the country.

By nightfall, the militants had reached the flash-point city of Samarra, just 70 miles outside Baghdad, after having first seized Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home town, and other cities while pressing southward from Mosul.

The stunning speed with which the rout has unfolded in northern Iraq has raised deep doubts about the capacity of U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces, and it has also kindled fears about the government’s grip on the capital.

In a country already fraught with sectarian tension, with parts of western Iraq already in Sunni militant hands, the latest gains by insurgents from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria prompted cries of alarm from leaders of Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority.

Bush, Condi, Cheney, Hillary, Wolfowitz, Kerry, Kristol, Rummy, Perle, Biden, Powell, Reid, etc etc etc - all you guys own this shit.  And the only thing's that's more tragic than the colossal cluster fuck itself is the simple fact that there will never be any reckoning for it - because if everybody's responsible then nobody can be held accountable.

And as usual, if you wanna know the real deal, ask Juan Cole:

The fall of Mosul to the radical, extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a set of historical indictments. Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city, population roughly 2 million (think Houston) until today, when much of the population was fleeing. While this would-be al-Qaeda affiliate took part of Falluja and Ramadi last winter, those are smaller, less consequential places and in Falluja tribal elders persuaded the prime minister not to commit the national army to reducing the city.

It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. There was none. Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments.