Empire’s End

Happy Fourth Birthday, Operation Iraqi Infinitum!

Well, Dumbleyou is on TV right now, spinning and spinning and spinning away, trying desperately to polish his crusty turd of a misbegotten war into a bright shining diamond of democracy. What’s that? He’s not taking any questions? Oh that’s right, he’s on record with his opinion that as President, he’s not accountable for his actions to anyone but history (which, lucky for him, won’t pass its final judgment till long after he’s Texas-two-stepped off this mortal coil). He and his administration’s mouthpieces have said so many wildly stupid, ill-informed things in the last six years sometimes it’s an effort to remember which inaccurate prediction is appropriate to any given conversation about his term in office.

WMDs? Check. Greeted as liberators? Yup. Mission Accomplished? Oh, yeah baby! Other than throwing an election to which almost everybody showed up (mad props to the Iraqi citizenry on that one), we have fucked up every step of the way, most critically, beginning with turning our attention away from the clear and present danger in Afghanistan (which by all accounts, as a result of our inattention there, is slipping back into the same sorry condition we ‘liberated’ it from some four years ago) to the bogus threat of Iraq because our President a) has Daddy issues like you wouldn’t believe, and b) is a gullible, short-sighted, arrogant twit who surrounded himself from the start with creaking cronies from previous administrations who still had items to check off their old to-do lists.

9/11 made this President, and his ghastly miscalculation in Iraq is unmaking our country. Osama and Dumbleyou have put their pointy heads together and done in five years what the USSR couldn’t do in 50. They make such a great team, it’s hard to believe their families’ business ties only go back a couple generations.

On behalf of those of us who opposed this war from the first faint drumbeat echo, back in early 2002 when the White House was only beginning to roll out its sales plan, I’d just like to say “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry for the thousands of American lives lost. I’m sorry for the tens of thousands of Iraqi lives lost. I’m sorry for taking a terminally unstable corner of the world and dropping a lit bomb in it.

And today, I feel myself especially sorry for every American through the ages who has ever spilt blood to keep the American dream alive – from the Minutemen shivering in the cold at Valley Forge, to Abe Lincoln, to my Dad who took shrapnel in WWII to all our brave lads and lasses in Korea, Vietnam and Gulf War I – as we sit on the precipice of the end of the idea that used to be America.

Great empires are rarely brought down from without, and ours will be no exception. We had a pretty good run, but barring an act of God, America’s day as the world’s sole super-power and guiding moral authority is as good as over. I hate to think what will replace us, because all I see ahead is anarchy, and it is armed to the teeth.