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Iraq has become bloody mess

Silence is deafening from those who thought Iraq would be a cinch

Date published: 9/7/2003

THOSE WHO were positive in mid-May that Iraq was not another Vietnam are now strangely silent.

Others who were just as sure that those Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were hidden under the next stone waiting to be overturned aren't talking, either.

Meanwhile, American boys are being killed and maimed almost on a daily basis. The silence surrounding the dead and wounded also grows. Nobody wants to talk about American soldiers coming home in body bags or with limbs missing.

Nobody but their families, that is.

Gone, too, is the talk that these men and women are fighting for American freedom. Almost six months of bombing, shooting, killing and being killed has dispelled any claim that Iraq was a threat to United States security, either directly or indirectly.

This was never America's war; it was President Bush's war, a personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein, a political thirst for blood that now has our country mired in a military hell from which there is no clear or honorable way out.

Needless to say, it didn't work out the way Bush and all the hot-blooded war hawks predicted. We'd go in, crush Saddam Hussein's army, the Iraqi people would be forever grateful and we would walk out as oil-soaked heroes. That was the plan.

Instead, America finds itself fighting a guerrilla war with a civilian population that hates our guts. And that war will probably continue as long as we remain in Iraq.

American taxpayers are also faced with paying to first destroy and then rebuild a country. Estimates put just the initial phase of the rebuilding price tag at $100 billion. Those are dollars that are coming out of your paycheck.

That's likely to be just the beginning. As has already been the case, every time we rebuild something in Iraq, loyalists to Saddam Hussein blow it up. How many times can we afford to rebuild infrastructure that is almost certain to be destroyed?

Don't give me that hogwash about Iraqis still being afraid of the remnants of Saddam's fallen regime. Those people are not afraid of anyone. They just want us out.

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Date published: 9/7/2003