Decline and Fall of the American Empire? Good Riddance

Saddam was a very bad man.  He was responsible for the deaths of a hell of a lot of his own folks.  How many?  Lots.  Seriously, it’s hard to say.  Nobody really knows.  After an extensive googlin’, looking at high and low estimates, I came away with somewhere around 100,000 a year.  Maybe more, maybe less, and probably less in the later years, more in earlier years.   Many died (some say) in those later years from depredations caused by the sanctions, which were the result of Saddam’s actions.  So I then started googlin’ to see how many Iraqi civilians have died from violence since we invaded them.  Again, the estimates vary wildly.  The US government and military seem to habitually underestimate casualties, undercounting those directly caused by coalition action and completely ignoring those killed by militias in the ongoing civil war, which is a direct result of the US invasion.  I finally came up with a number around 100,000 a year, perhaps more.  Why aren't they kissing our red white and blue asses, again?

The difference is that instead of Saddam being responsible for the carnage, now we are.  There was a point in the Afghan war (you know, the backwater, secondary front on the “War on Turrur” where the guys who actually attacked us were hiding…) where we had Osama bin Laden (the leader of the guys who actually attacked us) and a huge chunk of the leadership of Al Qaeda (the guys who actually attacked us, not the Iraqis) were cordoned off at a place called Tora Bora (sounds like a cool exotic vacation destination, does it not?  “We just got back from Tora Bora.  It was gorgeous! And they all speak English and kept telling us how great we Americans are!  We like it when funny little brownies tell us how great we are.”).  So we had old OBL and his boys, but since most of our resources were in Iraq (who did not attack us and was an enemy of al Qaeda too, by the way), we had to subcontract the standard heavy infantry role out to Afghan warlords, who were either bribed or spooked into…abandoning the cordon…allowing our REAL enemy to escape to the territory of our “ally”, Pakistan, where he or his ghost and the top leadership of Al Qaeda have hidden out ever since.  Thanks, Pakistan.  With allies like you…

And with idiot leaders like the neocons…

I like to frame it like a trial lawyer would, building up a case for massive, criminal negligence…

But for the fact that we invaded Iraq…

We would not be responsible for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths…

We might very well have captured the leadership of our actual enemies…

Oh hell, on and on and on…money, lives, time, effort, moral high ground…all lost because we elected (?) a mushmouthed idiot figurehead, whose strings were pulled by short sighted wicked men not half as smart nor wise as they arrogantly perceived themselves to be.

The decline and fall of the American empire.  It was brewing for a while, but the stolen election of 2000 assured its inexorable beginning inertia.

And if the empire is doomed to spread more misery and destruction and death than prevent the same…and if our decline will result in our not sending our troops around the world on the stupidest, most tenuous delusions of our moronically evil leaders…GOOD FOR US, BETTER FOR THE WORLD.