Celebrating the "Catastrophic Success" in Iraq

The Iraq War was - and has been - in the words of those who prosecuted it, a "catastrophic success."

on the eve of the 3rd Anniversary of the Operation Iraqi Liberation, it is worth remembering the speech that the US President had made, while initiating the invasion:

"We are going to ignore the United Nations in order to make clear to Saddam Hussein that the United Nations cannot be ignored. We're going to wage war to preserve the UN's ability to avert war. The paramount principle is that the UN's word must be taken seriously, and if we have to subvert its word to guarantee that it is, then by gum, we will. Peace is too important not to take up arms to defend...

Further, if the only way to bring democracy to Iraq is to vitiate the democracy of the Security Council, then we are honor-bound to do that too, because democracy, as we define it, is too important to be stopped by a little thing like democracy as they define it.

Also, in dealing with a man who brooks no dissension at home, we cannot afford dissension among ourselves. We must speak with one voice against Saddam Hussein's failure to allow opposing voices to be heard. We are sending our gathered might to the Persian Gulf to make the point that might does not make right, as Saddam Hussein seems to think it does. And we are twisting the arms of the opposition until it agrees to let us oust a regime that twists the arms of the opposition. We cannot leave in power a dictator who ignores his own people. And if our people, and people elsewhere in the world, fail to understand that, then we have no choice but to ignore them..."

of course, GW Bush never made such a speech!!!... but this, in essence, was the "logic"
- of the "shock and Awe",
- of deaths of tens of thousands of liberated iraqis,
- of invisible body-bags,
- of Abu Ghraib,
- of torture and abuse,
- of massive corruption by the occupiers,
- of squeezing one's pound of flesh,
- of holding a populace hostage,
...of spending $1trillion to demolish a country with a GDP of less than $40bn, etc. etc.)