Countdown

The headlines this morning are all focused on when the hammer will fall (no not that hammer, but his day is nigh too). However, while officialdom sits even more firmly on their asses than usual, events continue to occur...

Juan Cole has a solid rap/rip on Team Bush this morning, reminding us all that the prospect of a fundamentalist state in Iraq was ridiculous as late as 2002--but not anymore:

...anyone who heard that Bush thought Usamah Bin Ladin could overthrow Saddam and take over Iraq would have just fallen down laughing. Saddam would have had all the al-Qaeda people just taken out and shot. Twice. It was risible. Now, Bush has screwed up things so royally that he can even say this with a straight face. (It still is fairly ridiculous, since 80 percent of Iraqi is Shiites and Kurds who would kill Usamah on sight, and few Iraqi Sunni Arabs would want a fugitive Saudi terrorist as their leader). It is George W. Bush's fault if this outcome is at all plausible. His policies have reduced Iraq to violent chaos, and he is the one who let Usamah escape at Tora Bora. And then he made the US military lie about it during the presidential campaign! Impeachment is too good for this kind of dishonesty and incompetence. Actually I have to just stop writing about this now before my blood pressure goes into the 200s. Usamah in Iraq, indeed.

Meanwhile, the death toll continues to climb there--both for US forces AND Iraqi civilians...who, for those who might need to be reminded, weren't exactly consulted on the decision to invade:

The number of Iraqis who have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion is many times larger than the U.S. military death toll of 2,000 in Iraq. In one sign of the enormity of the Iraqi loss, at least 3,870 were killed in the past six months alone, according to an Associated Press count.

One U.S. military spokesman said it is possible the figure for the entire war could be 30,000 Iraqis, which many experts see as a credible estimate. Others suspect the number is far higher, since the chaos in Iraq leaves the potential for many killings to go unreported.

The losses are far larger than most analysts and Pentagon planners expected before the war and mean Iraqi civilians are bearing most of the suffering.

"We may never know the true number of the Iraqi public that has been killed or injured in this war," said the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Lt. Col. Steve Boylan. "The Iraqi public has taken the brunt of the casualties."

Way to go, GOP. You've managed to accomplish something almost impossible: make Iraqis even less safe than they were before:

"Most Iraqis remain less secure than they were under Saddam, less secure even than they were in the first year of the American occupation," said James Dobbins, a former Bush administration envoy to Afghanistan and veteran diplomat who now directs the Rand Corp.'s International Security and Defense Policy Center.

Dobbins supplied figures from the Baghdad morgue that show 1,800 violent deaths in 2002, Saddam Hussein's last full year in power. That number jumped beyond 6,000 in 2003, the first year of the American occupation, and topped 8,000 last year, he said.

"Under Saddam, you usually were OK as long as you kept your mouth shut," said Joost Hiltermann, an Iraq analyst with the International Crisis Group. "Now you might get hurt or even killed almost arbitrarily, given the absence of rule of law, the sectarian fighting, insurgent actions and U.S. carelessness in responding to attacks."

Another Center for Strategic and International Studies expert, Jon Alterman, who heads the think tank's Middle East program, said: "Almost certainly, there were more deaths in the last 2 1/2 years than there would have been had Saddam stayed in power."

And, I repeat myself, but it bears mentioning yet again: this was NOT a necessary war--it was fought at the discretion of those who, at this very moment, are worried about saving their sorry posteriors in the matter of outing a NOC dedicated to STOPPING THE PROLIFERATION OF UNCONVENTIONAL WEAPONS. Geez. What a sorry group of people sitting at the apex of power.