They talked it up while the compliant media mills incited the jingoistic armchair patriots across the land. "It’ll be a cake walk;" "they’ll welcome up with roses and sweets;" "we’ll be in and out of there in no time." And, the mother of all the neocons’ phraseology: "Mission Accomplished."

Here we are some three plus years later and there was no cake, or roses, or sweets. Needless to say, George and the rest of the chicken hawks did accomplish a few things. They succeeded in murdering a few hundred thousand innocent Iraqi men, women and children. And, they managed along the way, to condemn to death some 2,635 men and women of the U.S. military -- between Afghanistan and Iraq.

The cowards in Washington also managed to severely maim -- both physically and psychologically -- another 20,000 men and women of the U.S. military. These young men and women will be reminded of the criminal actions of the cowards in Washington for the rest of their lives. The people’s war crimes tribunal can also never forget the more than one million Iraqi wounded and broken by the actions of George, Dick and Rummy. Someday, they will pay.

The gang of four, plus one -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Blair -- did accomplish quite a bit in Iraq though. They managed to accumulate billions of dollars in obscene profits for the Bush "Pioneers" along the way. Of course, the war profiteers will tell us that they were just acting out of the goodness of their blackened hearts, for the good of the Iraqi people. I believe all war profiteers should be shot, what do you think?

In addition to killing, maiming and poisoning the entire country, the genocidal perpetrators in Washington also managed to live up to their self-fulfilling prophetic pronouncements of "bombing 'em back to the stone age."

Now, after all of that death and destruction -- and let us not forget instilling democracy -- the war criminals in Washington find themselves in a pickle as regards their crusade in Mesopotamia because the folks in this country are pissed off. Of course, we’re not quite as pissed off as the folks in the Arab world, but the folks over here have had a bellyful of George and the gang and their war.

So now three years and much profit later, George and the boys and one girl are trying to extricate themselves. Of course, they are not going to talk about the obscene profits they have all made. They will not talk about the death and destruction they have caused, both in Mesopotamia and here. They refuse to let us all in on their dirty little secrets and lies which led up to this death and destruction. No, forget about all of that. That was then, this is now.

Now it is: "We have no money for you to make your country or lives-whole again. You’ll have to do it yourselves." and "We don’t like the democracy that you have chosen for yourselves, so you damned well better try another brand. Of course, you have copied some of our democratic concepts; secret police, death squads, knocking doors down at 3 a.m., terrorizing women and children, spying on those who don’t agree with you, etc. But that isn’t what we envisioned, you must remember, we are the pullers of the strings, and, by golly, when we say jump, you are supposed to ask, 'How high?'"

So the neocons are in a small bind. They did accomplish a few things. They have the oil -- such as it is. They will have permanent military bases in Iraq and little "Green Zone" enclaves dotted strategically near wherever the oil and facilities are. But that is all they want. They have no desire to fix what they broke; there is no rush to offer repatriations to the Iraqi people. Nah, that kind of stuff is for sissies; we came, we saw, we conquered and all that other stuff is extraneous bullshit.

But the conquerors have not really conquered; Bush and the gang don’t lend much credence to history so they have no idea. The fertile plain of Mesopotamia has seen all manner of little tinhorn dictators and conquerors, and they have survived for centuries. I believe it was in the Riverbend blog where I read a most appropriate response to the neocons’ statement about having no money and that Iraq would have to do their own repair of their broken country. Riverbend noted that statement, and then responded, in words to the effect: "We have been rebuilding for centuries, just get out and leave us alone, we’ll do it again."

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