“I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
— Dick Cheney, ‘Meet The Press,’ March 16, 2003

Nowadays, the Iraqi people really, really don’t like their shit of a life. Near absent from any US news coverage, the country is still going through some bad times.
Today, multi-car bombs went off in several Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad, killing at least 37 people and wounding more than 100 — yesterday, a suicide bomber assassinated Brig. Gen. Ali Aouni, head of the Iraq Defense Ministry’s intelligence academy, and three of his bodyguards in the northern city of Tal Afar.

Elsewhere in Iraq — an IED killed three soldiers when it exploded in Badush; gunmen fired upon a Falluja checkpoint, killing one civilian, wounding five others; in Muqdadiy, a blast at a mosque killed one policeman, wounded three worshippers; a cop died while trying to defuse a bomb in Ramadi; two soldiers were wounded in an attack in Sajar (while looking for the perpetrators, soldiers fired upon a car killing one civilian and wounding another); bombs rendered an oil pipeline inoperative near the Baiji refinery; and so forth in a leisure stroll through the cradle of civilization.

(Illustration found here).

In 2012, according to Iraq Body Count, there were an estimated 4,500 civilian deaths by violence — and since March 2003, when war started, there have been between 111,048 and 121,346 Iraqi civilians killed.
And that’s a way-low-ball count. Some studies have estimated well-more than half a million have been killed (and at the high point: 500 Iraqis a day).

Last week, in a complete lack of compassion, or any sense of cruel irony,  The Dick wise-cracked: “I’m not a fan of Barack Obama’s. I’ll go that far,” he told CBS’ Charlie Rose. “It’s a gentlemanly statement, Charlie. He won the election. But I do think the man is doing serious, serious long-term damage to the country.”
And Jon Stewart proclaimed about The Dick: “This guy was wrong every time — every time he analyzed it. You try that at work.”

Yes, indeed.

Next month will mark a full-blown decade since George Jr. and The Dick launched what the late, great US Army Lt. Gen. William Odom called “the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history,” and the culprits have stayed free. The Dick appears on TV talking shit, and George Jr. paints creepy pictures of himself in the shower.
One cannot fathom how this is…

Tomrrow night (Monday), a documentary special, “Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War,” is scheduled for MSNBC and to be hosted by Rachel Maddow — Michael Isikoff (who co-wrote the book) previews it.
Money snip:

“It was a shock, it was a total shock–I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this,” Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, told me in an interview for the documentary.
Zinni, who had access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence on Iraq, was on a stage in Nashville, Tennessee, receiving an award from the Veteran of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, when he heard the vice president launch the opening salvo in the Bush administration’s campaign to generate public support for an invasion.
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said.
“There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”
Zinni, sitting right next to Cheney’s lectern, says he “literally bolted” when he heard the vice president’s comments.
“In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD [weapons of mass destruction], through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”
He recounts going to one of those CIA briefings and being struck by how thin the agency’s actual knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs was.
“What I was hearing [from Bush administration officials] and what I knew did not jive,” Zinni says.

The administration of GW Bush is the worse in US history — everything that shit-crew touched turned to worse than shit, from Iraq, Katrina and Wall Street. Yet these pilfering assholes are allowed to run free.
While the Iraqi people continue to die.
Someday, friends, there will be justice.