The BushCheney legacy now playing out in Iraq

This is only a small excerpt of an article by Juan Cole.   I quote it because it succinctly summarizes the inevitable position we find ourselves in as the result of having been led to invade Iraq in 2003 by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney under false charges of weapons of mass destruction.

The fact is that we made a mess and we left behind a mess.   Iraq is crumbling, and we contributed to it's coming to this point.   But going back in is not the answer.   Here's Cole:

" . . .  It is an indictment of the George W. Bush administration, which falsely said it was going into Iraq because of a connection between al-Qaeda and Baghdad.  There was none.  Ironically, by invading, occupying, weakening and looting Iraq, Bush and Cheney brought al-Qaeda into the country and so weakened it as to allow it actually to take and hold territory in our own time. They put nothing in place of the system they tore down. They destroyed the socialist economy without succeeding in building private firms or commerce. They put in place an electoral system that emphasizes religious and ethnic divisions. They helped provoke a civil war in 2006-2007, and took credit for its subsiding in 2007-2008, attributing it to a troop escalation of 30,000 men (not very plausible). In fact, the Shiite militias won the civil war on the ground, turning Baghdad into a largely Shiite city and expelling many Sunnis to places like Mosul. There are resentments.

"Those who will say that the US should have left troops in Iraq do not say how that could have happened. The Iraqi parliament voted against it. There was never any prospect in 2011 of the vote going any other way. Because the US occupation of Iraq was horrible for Iraqis and they resented it. Should the Obama administration have reinvaded and treated the Iraqi parliament the way Gen. Bonaparte treated the French one?"

There is much more:   about Saddam's regime, about the Sunni-Shia conflicts, about the Iraqi army, the politics and pricing of oil.   But it is our role in making things worse by meddling so stupidly and irresponsibly that I want to emphasize.

And it is important to do so, because -- predictably -- Lindsey Graham and John McCain lost no time in jumping before the tv cameras to denounce Obama's pulling our troops out and ending the war in Iraq.   The American people know better.   McCain and Graham should be ashamed.

Ralph