Anniversary observed

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the USA... oh yes, and its cobbled-together Coalition of the Willing.

US Vice President Dick Cheney sums up these five long years thus:

“If you reflect back on those five years, it’s been a difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavour.”

I won’t reflect — yet again — on the fact that all the assumptions and projections made by the ‘architects’ in support of this appalling misadventure have been proved wrong, wrong, WRONG!

Personally, I’m sick to death of that whole futile ‘dialog’.

It’s quite evident that there is absolutely no set of circumstances that could possibly obtain, under which those nabobs could ever admit failure in this ‘endeavour’.

UPDATE: Australia’s former foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer has imparted another load of his wisdom on the punters:

“Obviously mistakes have been made, from time to time, during the five years.”

Obviously this has only now occurred to him; otherwise he would have leveled with his fellow Australians and conveyed any misgivings he might have had at the time. Right?

“I think in particular the Americans should have had more troops on the ground earlier than they did.”

I seem to recall at least one semi-desperate request from the US for more troops from its Coalition partners. Alex and his boss then apparently thought they knew better.

“The surge has been successful recently but that was very late in the piece, and I think it would have been better to have those troops a lot earlier.”

You don’t say, genius! Blah blah yadda yadda...

Please enjoy your retirement, Alex. As soon as possible. It’s on us.