George W. Bush has blood on his hands. So does Dick Cheney. So does Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and every other member of the Bush administration who actively or passively guided this nation over a precipice and into an unholy quagmire. They have the blood of 3,400 (and counting) American soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians on their callused hands. And the vermilion tide flows unabated, stiffly lapping at their heels.
As public discontent with the Iraq War grows in lockstep with the casualties, and as the debate over here rages along with the conflict over there, the reckless ideologues who caused this conflagration and continue to fan its flames go unpunished. Why? By any reasonable definition, have they not committed war crimes? Ought they not be held accountable for their terrible misdeeds? Aside from being less overtly bloodthirsty and more discriminate about—and removed from—the terror and violence they have wreaked, how are Bush, Cheney, et al. any different than rogues like Osama bin Laden, Abu Ayub al-Masri, or Muqtada al-Sadr? They all have the blood of innocents on their hands. They all rationalize the irrational and employ violence as a means to an end. They all claim that their cause is righteous and take shelter behind a perverted ideology. They all deserve to stand for their crimes.
Unfortunately, such justice will remain as elusive as peace. Bush and Cheney will not be called to account for their crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. They will not be impeached by Congress for high crimes and misdemeanors. In 614 days (and counting), they will walk away from the offices they have sullied and hold their heads unjustifiably high, never once glancing down or back to see the gore that they have tracked everywhere. They will leave the stains for another administration to clean up and go home to write their biographies and rewrite history.
In the end, only history will stand in judgment of these feckless thugs, and they will not be spared. The blood they have washed their hands of will be reapplied by future generations. But that is meager consolation now, when justice and accountability are so lacking. And the wrongs persist. And the innocents crumple. And the streets are spattered in vermilion.
Kmareka.com 
Words have meaning and meaningful words differ from political rhetoric, or riding a new bandwagon. Mr. Bush and his administration have indeed taken a bad situation and made it worse on the one hand, but better on the other. Certainly you the Kurds are better off today than before the overthrow of the terrorist Hussein and his company of perversion. There are more newspapers available in Mosul, with more diversity of opinion, then there are in most of the East Coast of the U.S. combined. Colleges are open to all, men and women alike, and there are even tourist flights from Europe, open banks, cash machines, a postal system, police officers writing traffic tickets, and even real estate brokers. Elsewhere, the Marsh Arabs have their marshes back after the Hussein loonies drained them and destroyed sensitive ecologies, and with the return of the marshlands, the Marsh Arabs again have their ancient way of life. Mostly things are good for the southern Shiites as well, no longer under the Sunni oppression. So where are the crimes agains the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs or the southern Shiites? Why, they ended with the ouster and the overdue killings of the evil sons of Mr. Hussein and the inglorious hanging of Mr. Hussein himself. The deaths of this evil clan, sort of a bizarre Adams Family of the Middle East, will not bring back the million or so people they murdered, Hitler-like, or the still missing Kuwaitis or the Iranians they gassed, or thousands of other likely murdered in the Hussein killing fields, but it is better for most of the Iraqis than before the invasion. The invasion can of course be faulted on many grounds, in part bad intelligence and assessment of threat, and mostly bad post-war management. There was no Macarthur giving the Japanese democracy and freedom, just a series of ho-hum bureaycrats without a vision. But tell that to the Kurds or the Marsh Arabs or the southern Shiites, and they will say it is good to be free of Hussein and his cohorts, even if he had not reconstituted his biologicals, his gas shells or his nuclear dreams.
It is also very important to recall that for all his ineptness, Mr. Bush acted on the same information available to Mr. Clinton and his crowd, who were equally inept. Recall the “wag the dog” episode when we all feared Mr. Clinton would launch a war to distract attention from his difficulties with Monica. Mr. Clinton did launch some missiles and send aircraft, and seemed on the brink of “courage” but was apparently diverted by a lessening of public attention to whether he could keep his pants on or not in the oval office. as an aside, it is ironic that Mr. Clinton had difficulty keeping his pants on, but stopped caring when the polls indicated no one cared (not even Hillary apparently), and his erstwhile security person, Mr. Berger (or is it Burglar?), seemd to want to stuff things (secret Iraq-related documents) into his pants This is all so Christopher Hitchensesque, and worth another book.
Of course, the current Mr. Bush and his people had the same information as Mr. Clinton, and the British and the Germans and the French and the Russians, and the U.N. (at least that part of the U.N. not taking bribes from Mr. Hussein). The information was wrong or incomplete. But, we also forget Mr. Hussein apparently fooled his own generals–they were sure he had his gas canisters and shells, and his germs stored somewhere, all ready to use on the Americans, Aussies and Brits. When our troops breached the first Iraqi lines, and entered the trenches dug by the Iraqis or the storehouse, they discovered Iraqi chemical suits, all fresh and new, as well as vials and vials of nerve gas antidotes, all nicely packaged for the Iraqi troops. It seems Mr. Hussein was about as clever a general as he was a politician–there were sharper tacks in the shed.
This (Iraq) is a miserable situation and, indeed, we have lost 3400 amazing kids and 25,000 wounded since the invasion and we should ask if it was worth the sacrifice. If you are a Kurd or a Marsh Arab or a Southern Shiite, an enormous debt is owed for the losses of our sons and daughters and those of the Brits, Aussies, Japanese, Italians, Canadians, and others, not just in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan. Of course this must and will end–there are almost 190,000 Iraqis in uniform now, and should deal with the events in their own country.
I do believe it will be a close call if Iraq, largely a creation of imperialistic mapmakers, will survive as a coherent entity. It may well be that Mr. Biden’s and others’ notion of independent or semi-independent provinces/states is the best road to stability. Certainly the Kurds would not object too strenuously.
There is evil in this world and I do think a case can be made that the West cannot remedy all the ills and pathologies that exist. However, we must be certain that our own interests are protected, and sometimes that can be messy and less than orderly.