Wooden Anniversary

And so we come to the fifth anniversary of George and Dick and Don’s Excellent Iraq Adventure; MSNBC has a bit of a retrospective here. Fifth year traditionally marks the “wood” anniversary (I guess one would give gifts of… furniture or salad bowls?) And in the case of the Bush Administration, wooden sums up the thought processes surrounding the war. With the benefit of a little time, we can now see that there was no basis for anyone to have trusted this Administration in its claims of the allegedly grave threat presented by Saddam, and his now established to be non-existent WMD arsenal; claims of ties to al-Qaeda were more or less debunked at the time. Later claims of a desire to bring democracy to Iraq have proven spurious. And, well… one wonders… why are we there? What has been gained from this outrageously expensive occupation?
And then the answer kind of jumps out at you. Was that originally the intended reason that billions if not trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives to have been flushed down the Mess O’ Potamia? No, the whole problem is that the “block-of-wood” mental acuity of the Bush Administration means it probably actually believed its own tripe about the grave threat posed by Saddam (even as the Administration was overplaying if not manufacturing evidence of that threat!)…
Still… expensive oil sure is a nice bonus for our first “all oil man” administration, don’t you think?