We've done what we could do, now it's time to go.

After the WMD excuse was punctured, there was found to be no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, and more terrorists came into Iraq than were there before we invaded, President Bush and his administration had to claim that we invaded to 'bring Democracy to Iraq.' Then, as the Washington Post reported in its August 14 edition,

"the document on which Iraq's future is to be built [the constitution] will require laws to be compliant with Islam. Kurds and Shiites are expecting de facto long-term political privileges. And women's rights will not be as firmly entrenched as Washington has tried to insist, U.S. officials and Iraqi analysts say...we set out to establish a democracy, but we're slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic Republic

so we had lost hundreds and hundreds of troops merely to establish another fundamentalist Islamic republic.

But now it seems we don't even have that. Today, the Iraqi parliament voted to send a draft of the new constitution to the people that is certain to be opposed by Sunnis. In fact, Sadoun Zubaydi, a Sunni member of the drafting committee, put it this way, placing blame squarely where it is due:

“Bush’s hypocrisy is huge — in January he wouldn’t allow a postponement of parliamentary elections to allow all groups to prepare properly because he was trying to sugarcoat everything that happens here for his domestic audience,” Zubaydi said.

“Now, he’s calling the Shiites and issuing instructions that they should not ignore the group that was marginalized in those defective elections. ... To the last minute, this supposedly Iraqi process is being dictated by the U.S. government.”


This is likely to lead to more, not less, bloodshed and possibly civil war. It is hard to see how it will benefit the United States to be caught in the crossfire in any Iraqi civil war, and no matter what happens as a result, it would be hard to claim it is anything that it is worth losing the lives of so many American soldiers for.