After a brief lull, all hell seems to have broken out in Iraq, and our troops are bearing the brunt. Two major events in two days have left 10 US soldiers dead, and 44 wounded.
A U.S. Black Hawk medivac helicopter crashed Thursday near this stronghold of the anti-American insurgency, killing all nine soldiers aboard, the U.S. military said. A witness said the helicopter was hit in the tail by a rocket.
The military also said a U.S. soldier died Wednesday of injuries suffered in a mortar attack that wounded 33 other troops and a civilian west of Baghdad.
For the record, that's 37 killed since Saddam was captured, and just four shy of 500 (source:
Lunaville)
And, to top it all off, we now have additional confirmation that this entire enterprise was for naught. We've lost 500 soldiers and counting, hundreds of billions of dollars, and emnity around the world. And for what? For nothing.
Iraq had ended its weapons of mass destruction programs by the mid-1990s and did not pose an immediate threat to the United States before the war, according to a report released Thursday.
Bush administration officials likely pushed U.S. intelligence assessors to conform with its view the country posed an impending danger, said one of the authors of the study.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace -- a nonpartisan, respected group that opposed the war in Iraq -- conducted the study.
It follows a nine-month search in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction -- nuclear, biological and chemical -- the key reason the administration cited in its decision to invade Iraq.
"We looked at the intelligence assessment process, and we've come to the conclusion that it is broken," author Joseph Cirincione said Thursday on CNN's "American Morning." [...]
More than 1,000 U.S. inspectors have worked daily since before the war began in March, searching the country and interviewing scientists and other Iraqi officials, according to Cirincione.
"We found nothing," Cirincione said. "There are no large stockpiles of weapons. There hasn't actually been a find of a single weapon, a single weapons agent, nothing like the programs that the administration believe existed."
Nothing, nothing, nothing. So the admininstration now tries to minimize the WMD issue, even though it was public reason Number One to go to war. We are told about Saddam's brutality, even as this administration sends $500 million annually to brutal regimes that
boil their dissidents alive. (And that's just the
tip of the iceberg regarding brutal regimes the US funds.)
No -- the only valid reason this administration could've ever had to invade Iraq was a clear threat to our national security. And the fact is, the administration's WMD were grounded in LIES.
They just made shit up.