Photos That Make the Rude Pundit Want to Down a Handful of Thorazine With a Bottle of Jack Daniels:


A dozen coordinated car bombings, including at a hospital, 70 dead, a couple of hundred wounded, a Vice President accused of running death squads on the run in Kurdistan, a government about to collapse, the security forces already seen as failures. That was a trillion dollars well-spent. The Rude Pundit wonders if the wounded and the families of the dead in Iraq wish that the United States was still there or if they had never come at all.

The final withdrawal of (nearly all) troops from Iraq is simply the movement to the next phase of inevitable violence in that nation. You know what the most awful, pathetic thing is? That the Arab Spring might have spread to Iraq. That the people there would have overthrown Saddam Hussein, as Libyans did Qaddhafi (with some NATO assistance). That they would have decided their fate by rising up in messy, contentious unity and then had to work it out for themselves.

When we in this nation think about the cost of the war, when we think about what we actually did to that country, when we think about what we've done to ourselves, when we think of all the people who got away with this crime, when we hear politicians who supported the thing in the first place now say, "If we knew then what we know now," we should curl into a fetal ball and ask for this to be lobotomized from our national conscience. But we should be told that it can't be cut out or erased. And the other worst part is that not only are we damned to remember, we are damned to arrogantly ignore it and move on.