Flipping & flopping amid bloody chaos

Back in April, 2004, some big-shot pol in Washington got his feathers all ruffled and insisted that comparing Iraq with Vietnam was "a false analogy." Hey, wait a minute. That pol was George W. Bush.

Flip. Flop. Today the very same George W. stood before a VFW audience in Missouri and compared Iraq with (ahem) Vietnam, trying to make some incomprehensible case for the US staying in Iraq.

Meanwhile, some of Bush's top commanders are now saying that democracy might not be such a great idea for Iraq after all. Maybe they are being influenced by the political successes budding all around them. CNN summed up those "successes" today. Almost 50% of the parliament does not go to cabinet meetings. (That's when they're in town; right now they are on a month's vacation.) In Baghdad, water and electricity are shaky. Health care and the national police are run by separate militias connected with Iran. Death squads roam Sunni neighborhoods. Sectarian neighborhood cleansing is creating segregated enclaves. Thousands of civilians are being killed every month across the country. Two million Iraqis have already fled the country.

I wonder if the historians of the future will ever be able to fully measure the devastation unleashed by this man on March 19, 2003.