THE BUSH/CHENEY LEGACY:

1. Approaching 2500 American soldiers killed and well over 17,000 severely injured... not to mention the fallout to come from post-tramatic stress disorder. Additionally, Veterans' Affairs hospitals are overwhelmed, understaffed, and underfunded... ensuring that veterans themselves will receive marginal benefits at best, for their allegiance to their "commander", Bush.

2. Tens of thousands of Iraqi's servicemen slaughtered... "their young sons", who just happened to be hapless conscripts in Saddam's ragtag army... "shocked and awed" into bloody oblivion by our overwhelming War Machine... as well as tens of thousands of innocent non-combatant civilians laid waste and euphemistically brushed aside as "collateral damage".

[It is important to note that Bushcorp utterly failed in its moral responsibility to at least attempt an accurate accounting of Iraqis killed, incriminating though it would have certainly been. A study published in the British medical journal Lancet (Oct 30, 2004), conducted by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health researches, put the slaughter of civilians at approximately 100,000! Of course, since that time, those horrific numbers have substantially risen.]

3. A country utterly devasted, and destroyed, lacking in basic sanitation, clean water, energy, and medical facilities,... with rampant unemployment and tens of thousands dispossed and homeless... many of which are children... a country plunged into a "living nightmare" of utter chaos and defacto civil war... with no real security and unrelenting factional violence and bloodshed.

[To quote the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalamy Khalilzad, the invasion opened up a "Pandora's box" of religious conflicts, which may lead to a regional conflagration as well as the rise of jihadists, who "would make Taliban Afganistan, look like child's play".]

4. The gift of recruitement for the islamic jihadists as well as al-Qaeda, who have only grown stronger... the gift that just keeps on giving, due to the continued oppressive US occupation as well as our lust for military installations and a permanent presence there

5. The creation of a proverbial "blackhole" of impossible "nation-building", which candidate Bush solemnly swore he would never do... the effects of which will saddle our nation for decades, like the proverbial millstone: the U.S. is damned if it leaves, and damned if it stays.

6. The complete loss of prestige and credibility abroad, among our erstwhile allies, and a bitterly divided country at home... due to the propaganda, lies and corruption scandals of an administration that no sane person would trust.

7. DoD contractors feasting at the "no-bid" trough of largesse, wallowing in war-profiteering at tax-payer expense, and the $$$-Cheney-Halliburton-$$$ pipeline is as cozy and corrupt as it gets. Meanwhile our budget deficits approach $400 billion and our national debt is now over $8.2 TRILLION, compared to the Clinton administration, which left a budget surplus of $237 Billion and only $3.4 trillion in public debt, which was $2.4 trillion less than OMB projected! Team Bu$h is currently bloodletting the American tax-payers to the tune of $7 BILLION a month in Iraq ($6 billion alone) and Afganistan! A recent detailed analysis by a Harvard budget expert and a Nobel winning economist now puts the estimate for Bush's War at between $1-2 TRILLION!

[Recall that Larry Lindsey was in effect fired as Bush's economic advisor for having the gall to estimate the invasion would cost a mere $100-200 billion, which infuriated Rumsfeld and others, who were parotting estimates of only $50 billion. Wolfowitz revealed his utter ignorance by asserting: "There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money... the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three years...We're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." [Source: House Committee on Appropriations Hearing on a Supplemental War Regulation, 3/27/03])] Could they have been anymore wrong?

8. Sham elections, artificially imposed in the chaotic aftermath of "shock and awe", by the U.S. occupation force, which, if the country doesn't descend further into the abyss, will result in a Islamic Theocratic State, governed by Sharia law, and tightly alligned with Iran: the worst possible outcome, and a virtual haven for terrorists.

9. The architect of the terrorist strikes of September 11th, 2001, Osama bin Laden, remains defiantly at-large, apparently mocking Bush, who vowed 4 1/2 years ago to both the American public and to the grief-sticken families of the victims, to "hunt him down".

[Recall that 15 of the 19 hijakers were Saudi nationals, and that the evacuation of 140 Saudis ocurred in the immediate aftermath (about 24 of which were Binladens) on at least 8 aircraft, and has yet to be adequately explained. the "House of Saud" is closely aligned with the "House of Bush" via big oil and construction firms... known as the "Bush-Saudi Connection"... not to mention the fact that the Binladens are Saudis and have done millions in construction business with the U.S. government (via the Saudi Binladin Group)]!

10. The sad legacy of grotesque torture and systemic human rights abuses at the infamous Abu Ghraib... nearby Camp Nama's "Black Room"... and Guantanamo Bay ("Gitmo"): a grim reminder of the utter hypocrisy of Bush touting America's morally superiority. The U.S. military warehouses over 10,000 "detainees" in multiple prisons.


The founder of Army's Delta Force and author of "Inside Delta Force" , Ret. Command Sargeant-Major Eric Haney had this to say in a recent interview:

(3/28/06): Q: What's your assessment of the war in Iraq?
A: "Utter debacle. But it had to be from the very first. The reasons were wrong. The reasons of this administration for taking this nation to war were not what they stated. (Army Gen.) Tommy Franks was brow-beaten and ... pursued warfare that he knew strategically was wrong in the long term. That's why he retired immediately afterward. His own staff could tell him what was going to happen afterward.
We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies."


BOTTOM LINE: This War President of the Republican War Party has breached the public trust and led our Republic and its good citizens into a dark chasm. America is more bitterly divided than ever and both morally and fiscally bankrupt... with a demoralized military stretched too thin and asked to perform impossible policing functions for which they were neither prepared nor trained ... dependent upon a depleted and now ineffective National Guard... unable to attend to border and "homeland security", humanitarian needs or neglected infrastructure... not to mention the sad fact that, after this prolonged military misadventure, we are definitely less, not more secure.

[Recall that the majority of House democrats and 22 democratic senators voted against even giving Bush the authority to invade Iraq, while those that did, trusted he would have exhausted all diplomatic means, per the legislation, which he clearly ignored.]