The Iraq Study Group, while declaring that we are losing the war, advocates keeping American troops there in combat roles at least until early 2008 - yet another variation on "stay the course"; now, it's "stay the course a little while longer."
Our war ended 3 years ago, after Baghdad was captured, after the Iraqi army was disbanded, after the Baathist party was kicked out, after Saddam was captured, after the infamous weapons of mass destruction were found to be a lie, after Iraqi ties with al Qaeda were also found to be a lie. How else do you define the end of a war? Yet Bush's "justice" for the loss of 2,700 lives on 9/11 has been to add 2,900 more American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives to the slaughter pile.
Call the opposition what you will - insurgents, terrorists, saddamists, out-of-control militias, death squads, it is not our war any more. Yet our troops continue to fight and die in somebody else's war. It's time to bring them home.
And, once they are home, those who served faithfully in this brutal, ill-planned war should be amply rewarded for the stupendous sacrifices they have made. They should, for example, all receive housing and health care for free for the rest of their lives. Revoke the money given to the war profiteers to pay for it. If one soldier ends up homeless on the street or ill or deformed and uncared for, we as a nation ought to pause our relentless shopping and feel unmitigated shame.
As for President Bush and his gang, the ones who are responsible for all this butchery, I insist on impeachment - not as retribution, but to keep the man and his administration from doing further irreparable harm to our nation and our relations with the rest of the world. Add to the colossal blunder of the Iraq war the fact that he broke the law and defiantly continues to do so, with warrantless wiretaps and monitoring of bank transactions. Not to mention the designation, without any review, of large groups of people as "enemy combatants" to be held in prisons for years without trial or access to family or lawyers. The list is endless. With the massive secrecy with which that this administration cloaks its activities, who knows what other egregious assaults on American values this administration is perpetrating?
It will take a generation or more to clean up this mess, and I do not have enough confidence in the Democratic Congress to feel that these monumental problems can be overcome solely in the legislature. The Bush administration must be stopped, and the only way to do that is through impeachment. Yes, it will cost the nation financially and also devote precious resources that could be used elsewhere. But I honestly do not see the destruction ending without it. It would also show the world (more than the recent elections) that the American people have seen what has gone wrong and want to make it right. And, once impeached, the president and his henchmen should be tried for treason. The lies, the egregious transfer of wealth, the corruption, the hoarding of power, and just plain illegal and unconstitutional acts cry out for it. Then, when found guilty, he should be hanged. Then we should follow up with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz. And Condoleeza Rice ("No one could have imagined ...") should spend the rest of her rich-ass life in prison. We would have done no less with Hitler or Stalin if we had been able to capture them.
I am passionate about this because the past six years have been a relentless dive to the bottom for American principles, perpetrated by the Bush administration and facilitated by a too-compliant press and Congress. It all started with the Constitution-defying decision by the Supreme Court (supposedly the Constitution-protecting body) to stop counting votes in the 2000 election. I will never forgive that history-making assault on America. I cannot wait another two years for the offenders to be removed from power - and to be prominently displayed to the world as examples of what should never be tolerated in American government.
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