The Mess in Mesopotamia

In their quiet moments, are the men that brought us the War in Iraq haunted that they opened Pandora's box?

100 Iraqi civilians are being killed every day! Close to 2,600 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives, and another 18,000 or more have been wounded in action—often maimed for life—and thousands more fighting under the stress and strain of fighting a guerrilla war in which they never know when they might be shot or killed. Even if they survive Iraq physically, what they see and experience there often haunts them the rest of their lives.

That's the cost in human lives.

Financially, it's bankrupting the U.S. government to the tune of $6 billion a month to occupy Iraq and kill Iraqis.

Those who planned the war figured that they'd just take over Iraqi oil production and sell the oil to finance their occupation and rebuilding, but it hasn't worked out that way. They did manage to appropriate a few billion dollars in the Iraqi treasury when they took over, but they haven't made any money selling Iraqi oil. Iraqi insurgents, who consider the oil theirs and not America’s, keep blowing up the pipelines or otherwise managing to sabotage oil production, denying the U.S. the ability to profit from their national misery.

For the first time since Vietnam, the U.S. has once again found it's not as easy to get out of a war as it was to get into one. And getting into this one has not demoralized its military, drained the treasury, and alienated much of the world to the U.S.

The United States continues to embrace the dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as has been the case for 60 years. Meanwhile, Israel is attacking elected governments in the Palestinian Authority, and Lebanon, with U.S. support.

The mess in Mesopotamia indeed.