My source in the White House recently sent me what appears to be the final draft of the Iraq invasion plans. I think it may actually be from dubya's own hand. It's written in blue crayon and I've read that's his favorite color. Anyway, here it is in it's entirety.

1. Invade
2. Occupy
3. ???
4. Profit!!!

I know. I know. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but it seems obvious to me that more thought needed to go into step 3. We've gotten a little hung up there.

If you want to get a feel for what the Iraqi people have been going through for the last few years, you should check out Baghdad Burning. It's a blog written anonymously by an Iraqi female who calls herself Riverbend. She doesn't pull any punches and she doesn't try to hide her anger at what we have done to her country. I just checked out her last two posts for 2006 and, as usual, I left there with a deep sense of sadness.

I disagreed with this invasion from the very beginning, but having said that, I do think that right after Saddam's regime was toppled there was an opportunity for the US to create a better Iraq than existed before. We fucked this up so badly. Just imagine what could have been if all the pre-war rhetoric about spreading freedom and democracy and making the world safer had been anything more than a smoke-screen for small-minded men with dreams of Empire to hide behind. It's too late now. We can't fix what we've broken. About the best we can do at this point is get out and hope the Iraqis can somehow fix it themselves. I personally doubt that the nation of Iraq, as we once knew it, will ever exist again.