(Illustration found here).

Raining pretty good this Tuesday morning on California’s north coast and it’s supposed to keep it up the next few days. Despite the inconvenience, it’s not so bad and we need the water, especially to the south of us.
And we’re not so bad — my youngest daughter lives in Minneapolis and she’s going through her winter of discontent right now. Born and raised in the warm climes of south/central California, this her second winter in snow is a bummer (the first was near non-existent).
She told me last night on the phone that driving there, even with longtime locals, is insane.

Indeed — and even more insane with a way-sad note is the be-twitched country of Iraq. This month marks the 10th birthday (March 19) of George Jr.’s most dumb-ass f*ck-up (top of a humongous list of such shit) and a decade later, the horror continues.
Just this week, 21 Iraqis have been killed and at least 42 wounded in all kinds of violence across that beleagured country, from a car bomb in Kirkuk that killed two cops, to a bomb explosion near a soccer match in Khan Bani Saad, to a suicide bombing in Shirqat.
What a hell hole!
All on the head of the US.

And also another anniversary this month — on March 10, 2003, the country-music singing trio, The Dixie Chicks, offended the thin-skinned likes of some US assholes when band member Natalie Maines made this remark during a pause in a concert in London: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.”
Boy, did the shit hit the fan with all kinds of near-sighted nit-twits coming out of the woodwork to jump the girls for telling the freakin’ truth, and now ten years later the truth is still the truth.

LZ Granderson in a post at CNN notes the ludicrous-irony of the anniversary: If anything, Maines and company should be viewed as prophets, not pariahs, considering that the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration led the country to believe Saddam Hussein was housing were never found. Or that since 2006, the majority of Americans have felt the invasion was a mistake to begin with.

In a terrible piece of shit, described before hand by some of George Jr.’s choir boys as a “cakewalk,” Iraq has suffered near-beyond description.
And beyond the killing, $60 billion in aid money was just flushed down the sewer. In a report to be released today, the invasion was a total clusterf*ck all around.
Some highlights:

In his final report to Congress, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen’s conclusion was all too clear: Since the invasion a decade ago this month, the U.S. has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results.
The reconstruction effort “grew to a size much larger than was ever anticipated,” Bowen told The Associated Press in a preview of his last audit of U.S. funds spent in Iraq, to be released Wednesday.
“Not enough was accomplished for the size of the funds expended.”
…
To date, the U.S. has spent more than $60 billion in reconstruction grants to help Iraq get back on its feet after the country that has been broken by more than two decades of war, sanctions and dictatorship.
That works out to about $15 million a day.
And yet Iraq’s government is rife with corruption and infighting.
Baghdad’s streets are still cowed by near-daily deadly bombings.
A quarter of the country’s 31 million population lives in poverty, and few have reliable electricity and clean water.

Even outside the Iraq war zone, the ordinary GI faced the temptation. Former Fort Bragg Staff Sgt. Tonya Long was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for smuggling more than $1 million out of Afghanistan, where she was a customs inspector from January 2008 to April 2009.
Ms Long had a glory hole for awhile:

The release from Walker’s office says Long smuggled the money out of Afghanistan in videocassette recorders.
It says she stripped out the VCRs’ components, put the money inside, used her authority as a customs inspector to clear them through customs, and had them shipped to the U.S. in military shipping containers.
The smuggling was committed in January and February 2009, a court document says.
Long spent nearly $500,000 on herself and her family, the release says.
It says her purchases included a vacation, a car, personal surgeries, and a tractor-trailer.
Court records suggest that someone else is facing charges, but those records are sealed.

Maureen Dowd of the New York Times had a column yesterday  with a review of a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, “The World According to Dick Cheney,”
Dowd relays this: “If I had to do it over again,” the 72-year-old says chillingly of his reign of error, “I’d do it over in a minute.”
I used to love Dowd years ago, back in the glory days of George Jr. (she calls him W), but now mostly it’s just fluff pieces without much substance.

Our partner in the Iraq horror movie is the UK — Tony Blair is George Jr.’s war-crime suck buddy.
James Jeffrey, a British Army veteran of Iraq, delivers a bit of sad reflection on the Iraqi debacle in a post yesterday in the UK’s Guardian.
A few snips:

My nine-year British Army career started in 2001 and spanned the entire debacle of Iraq.
What is an Iraq veteran left with? For me, it starts with a sense of collective guilt for participating in an event that led to an estimated 120,000 civilian deaths and demolished a country.
And that’s before one gets to the sense of personal guilt for individual failures.
Giving an Iraqi mother short shrift at the gate to Camp Abu Naji, outside Al Amarah, when she came to enquire about a son arrested during an operation a few nights before, is but one example for me.
I really didn’t know what had happened to her son; a cursory check with the operations room indicated no one else did, either.
But to this day I can’t believe I didn’t try harder to do more for her.
It was, after all, a mother asking for her son: a yearning and emotional cost that lingers for every Iraqi male, insurgent, raghead – or whichever callous label we reduced them to – whom we shot, shelled, bombed, interrogated, cuffed, hooded, etc.
There’s no excuse for my behaviour, though in trying to cling to some rationale perhaps I’d begun to sense the whole enterprise – and my role in it – was flawed; a sense heightened as the years rumbled by, including a return tour in 2006, which culminated in a severe realisation that the emperor had no clothes.
…
All of which makes our present conduct even more intolerable.
Past failures are being compounded by what may be the UK’s biggest crime: doing its best impression of Pontius Pilate and having little if nothing to do with rebuilding the country it helped dismember.
The British consulate in Basra, scene of my futile 2006 tour and the British Army’s ignominious withdrawal in 2007, closed at the end of 2012.
We’re not exactly going out of our ways to make amends.

And one of the way-best foreign correspondents in the world, Brit Patrick Cockburn, who has covered Iraq, Afghansitan and places in between, says Iraq is a forgotten hellhole.
Via Counterpunch:

The escalating crisis in Iraq since the end of 2011 has largely been ignored by the rest of the world because international attention has been focused on Syria, the Arab uprisings and domestic economic troubles.
The US and the UK have sought to play down overwhelming evidence that their invasion and occupation has produced one of the most dysfunctional and crooked governments in the world.
Iraq has been violent and unstable for so long that Iraqis and foreigners alike have become desensitised to omens suggesting that, bad as the situation has been, it may be about to get a great deal worse.
…
Iraq is one of the great political minefields of the world.
It is full of ancient and modern battlefields where great empires have been humbled or destroyed. Saddam Hussein claimed to have built up an army of one million men in 1991, only to see it evaporate or mutiny.
Much the same happened in 2003.
The US army marched into Baghdad full of arrogant contempt for what Iraqis said or did.
Within a year the US military controlled only islands of territory in a country they thought they had conquered.

Every American should be ashamed — we are all chicks from dixie.