Happy Mission Accomplished Day, or Why We Are Truly Screwed

It's been five years now since Bush's triumphal "mission accomplished" extravaganza. Who can forget the photos from that day?


So, Chimpy, how about going on television and crowing about how all the good things you've managed to do with five years of peace and stability in Iraq?

Now this is why we are well and truly screwed: It has taken five years for the Bush Administration to admit that maybe the banner was not a good idea. Based on that, if we all could live forever, it would take about five thousand years for him to admit that this war was a bad idea.

Five years. Over 95% of the casualties we have suffered in Operation Clusterfuck have occurred after Bush's little display of hubris (not that he has any idea what that word means). Let's look at that in comparisons to a couple other wars. If 95% of the casualties had taken place after the "end of combat operations", as Der Monkey Fuhrer put it, the Union Army would have suffered 2.8 million casualties in occupying the South (not counting the millions who would have died from disease), the Army would have had over a million dead in occupying Germany after World War I and six million dead in occupying Germany and Japan after World War II. A million would have been killed in Korea between 1953 and 1958.

Except none of that happened.

We have been baby-sitting a civil war. That is obvious to over two-thirds of the American people and it is probably quietly acknowledged by even most of the dead-enders who still support this moronic war. But Hell will have frozen over before Bush acknowledges it. He will die in a jail cell in The Hague before he owns up to his mistakes and crimes.

UPDATE: Dana Milbank on the day's festivities.