A day that should live in infamy: March 19th 2003

Today is the fifth anniversary of a great national tragedy, the war in Iraq. However, President Bush still doesn't see it that way and today he delivered a speech strewn with the same old bromides he's been using for years.

On this day in 2003, the United States began Operation Iraqi Freedom. As the campaign unfolded, tens and thousands of our troops poured across the Iraqi border to liberate the Iraqi people and remove a regime that threatened free nations.

It is ridiculous to suggest that our invasion of Iraq was an humanitarian act of goodwill meant to "liberate" the Iraqi people. The war in Iraq has killed ten of thousands of Iraqi civilians, fueled a sectarian conflict and so destabilized the country that John McCain recently said we may have to occupy Iraq for one hundred years. What kind of liberation is this?

When President Bush says that Iraq threatened "free nations," it is just a bald faced lie. After the conclusion of the first Gulf War comprehensive sanctions were imposed on Iraq, causing its weapon's programs and economy to drift into disrepair. Iraq had no intention of threatening anyone. Iraq's neighbor to the north, Turkey, was also against the war. President Bush also kindly forgot to mention that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were nowhere to be found.

Aided by the most effective and precise air campaign in history, coalition forces raced across 350 miles of enemy territory -- destroying Republican Guard Divisions, pushing through the Karbala Gap, capturing Saddam International Airport, and liberating Baghdad in less than one month.

President Bush speaks as if the operation to "liberate" Iraq was an unrivaled display of military genius. The reality is that Iraq was such a broken and poor country that it was easy for us to race across the southern border and occupy Baghdad. Thomas Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times and a supporter of the war in Iraq, said, after a brief visit to the country in 2003, "we defeated the Flintstones." He noted that outside of the major cities, Iraq wasn't even in our millennium.

What our troops found in Iraq following Saddam's removal was horrifying. They uncovered children's prisons, and torture chambers, and rape rooms where Iraqi women were violated in front of their families. They found videos showing regime thugs mutilating Iraqis deemed disloyal to Saddam. And across the Iraqi countryside they uncovered mass graves of thousands executed by the regime.

It's undeniable that Saddam Hussein ran Iraq like a prison state, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking that President Bush -- or Cheney or Rumsfled -- were acting out of compassion when they decided to invade Iraq. If their concern was Iraq's humanitarian plight, why didn't they speak out against the U.N. sanctions that were killing innocent Iraqis, mostly children? Why didn't Donald Rumsfeld speak out against Iraq's use of chemical weapons when he was sent as a personal envoy of Ronald Reagan in 1983 to forge closer ties between our two countries? Saddam has been running a prison state for over twenty years, sanctions have been killing Iraqis for over ten, and President Bush wants us to believe that suddenly everyone in his Administration grew a heart? President Bush pretends to express sympathy for Iraq because it gives him the excuse he needs to implement his real objective: military and financial dominance of Iraq.

The battle in Iraq has been longer and harder and more costly than we anticipated -- but it is a fight we must win. So our troops have engaged these enemies with courage and determination. And as they've battled the terrorists and extremists in Iraq, they have helped the Iraqi people reclaim their nation, and helped a young democracy rise from the rubble of Saddam Hussein's tyranny.

The Bush Administration originally claimed the war in Iraq would cost $60 billion, but now it's run up into the hundreds of billions with no end in sight. Also, how will we know when we "win" in Iraq? Bush never says.

Bush also never bothers to list the horrible costs of the war. He can say that Saddam's torture chambers are now empty, but what about the fact that our invasion of Iraq triggered the world's third largest refugee crisis? Or the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers have been wounded? There have been no real benefits to the war in Iraq, just the old saw that we must stay in Iraq and hope things will get better.

Hopefully one day Americans will remember March 19th 2003 in the same way they remember the September 11 terror attacks or Pearl Harbor. It should be remembered as a national tragedy, a day in which a band of war criminals lied this nation into a pointless, costly, and treacherous war.