May 1

[BobcatJH]

Today is May 1, the day the empty codpiece stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln four years ago - under the banner reading "Mission Accomplished" - and, to the jubilation of an already in-the-bag Beltway press corps, proclaimed, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." As of that speech, 139 Americans had died. Since that day, more than 3,200 of our men and women have died. This is, of course, to say nothing of the thousands maimed, seriously wounded or left with lifelong mental scars, or the tens to probably hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed.

And for what?

Despite all of the bluster you will likely hear today, why we're still bogged down in Iraq, in the middle of a bloody civil war, is actually quite simple: Hubris. The principal justifications given us for this needless war have long been proven wrong. You know this. I know this. Even the president, I suspect, knows this. But everything since "Mission Accomplished" has been little more than an effort to make muddy a picture that is crystal clear, the notion that the Iraq of our creation (creation after destruction, really) won't be as the all-too-influential neocon enablers promised us it would be. Nowhere near, in fact.

It seems obvious that the sole remaining justification for our being there - and the continued death of soldier and civilian alike - is that if we just keep pressing, we'll eventually be able to figure out what stopped our original predictions from becoming realities. But, the tricky part is that, the longer we're there, the more enemies we create, thus giving our sorry excuse for leadership all the justification they need to keep hammering the square peg into the round hole. As Josh Marshall said, to describe the Iraq quagmire as "lost" omits the fact that the underlying premise was, in his words, bogus. Continuing, Marshall writes, "... the whole exercise is like getting trapped in a brown paper bag. You can keep going into the bag and into the bag and into the bag and never get out or change anything. Or you can just turn around and walk out of the bag."

What's clear is that, once in the bag, our disastrous foreign policy has caused irreparable, perhaps incalculable damage. Leaving won't be easy, nor will it repair all that's been done. But it's what must happen, though to say so still manages to get you branded by the right-wing as a pro-terrorist traitor. Just trust us, they'll say, and in an undetermined period of time, some progress, to employ the odious language used by this administration, might be made. Given the pro-war crowd's stellar track record with predictions, we would be wise to force their hand and force our way out of the bag. It's the only way, for the only reason we're still in Iraq, still dying and still killing, is because our president and his enablers refuse to admit what the rest of us have long known.

It's time to come home.