You and other neocon empathizers here tend to want to respin this simple fact into misconstrued excuses about why we went to war in Iraq. And its really quite simple: We went to war in Iraq because George Bush said Saddam Hussein possessed hundreds of tons of chemical and biological weapons that were a threat to the American people. He even claimed Saddam was on the verge of securing nuclearing weapons technology. He then said Saddam was collaborating with Al Qaeda. It turns out none of these things are true.

In the meantime, we have lost nearly 1,600 American soldiers and over 12,000 have been wounded - about half of those with permanent disabilities. Who knows how many tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed, since we refuse to keep track of these casualties? And, now we are witnessing a resurgence of the insurgency and an escalation in American casulaties.

Going to war in Iraq was a truly bad idea. We may like to naively comfort ourselves about seeding a democracy there, but its going to be decades before the country rebuilds and achieves stability. And while we are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars down the drain there, we are arguing here about how to patch up record deficits and keep social security and medicaid from tanking. Its a disaster.