The mule stays the course

This is what "unitary president" George Bush said yesterday, Nov. 28, 2006: “I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.”

Fade back to May 1, 2003. The same president descended from the skies and stood beneath the ever-more-infamous carrier banner that proclaimed to all the world "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED." Since that day, 2,745 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.

Fade a little farther back to March 19, 2003, when the war built on lies began. Since that day, 2,883 US troops have been killed in Iraq. (I won't repeat the stratospheric numbers of dead Iraqis that I've reported in this blog in the past.)

Most of the conscious world has known for months that Iraq is ripping itself apart in a Sunni-Shiite civil war. (Again, that's spelled C-I-V-I-L W-A-R.) Surely this has been the fact at least since the February bombing of the Shiite Askariya mosque in Samarra. Today even the former Iraq war supporter Colin Powell said that this is a civil war. But not the mule in the White House. Yesterday he blamed the relentless massacres on Al-Qaeda, even though almost all analysts are in agreement that Al-Qaeda makes up less than 10% of Iraqi insurgents.

What a pity that there could be no impeachment on March 20, 2003.