While eyes of just about everybody are on Afghanistan’s potboiler of a national election, a mutinous DOD without a clue and a rising death toll there of US troops, Iraq has become one of those horrific, malignant gifts that keeps on giving.

On Monday, there was considered “light violence” in Iraq — two US GIs died from non-combat injuries and only three Iraqis killed and two wounded.
Blessed relief?

Since the invasion in 2003, 4,357 US GIs have been killed, 31,545wounded and the toll on Iraqi itself is frightening: Six-plus years later 94,000 to 102,000, and by some estimates, upwards to more than 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died — another 4 million displaced.

(Illustration found here).

Of course, now it’s a given — the entire Iraqi misadventure was not only illegal, but immoral and Saddam had no WMD, despite Condi’s slobbering ‘mushroom-cloud‘ fearmongering and Dick Cheney’s bullshit to CNN: “We will succeed in Iraq, just like we did in Afghanistan. We will stand up a new government under an Iraqi-drafted constitution. We will defeat that insurgency, and, in fact, it will be an enormous success story.”

Glaringly worse in the false realm of Iraqi WMD — the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, the guy who’s been around the nuclear-watchdog block, on Monday called out George Jr. and Dick Cheney as liars, and did so in public.

‘I will always lament the fact that a tragic war was launched in Iraq,’ he said in a last address to the UN General Assembly.
‘This was done on the basis of false pretext, without the authorization of the UN Security Council,’ he said.
He said the IAEA and UN weapons inspectors had found ‘no evidence’ that Iraq’s nuclear programmes involved production of weapons of mass destruction.
‘It gives me no consolation that the agency (IAEA)’s findings were subsequently vindicated,’ he said, implying that the US military campaign in Iraq had caused high civilians casualties.

Along with the war crime of the Iraqi invasion, George Jr.’s White House changed the US and the world for the far, far worse. and once the cat’s out of the bag, or the horse is out of the barn (closing the barn door concept) or Pandora’s box pried open, the end result is the same — we be screwed.