A Sad Anniversary

Today was the 5th Anniversary of the "Mission Accomplished" speech on the aircraft carrier deck. I know that we Americans like our wars to be short and decisive and so Bush's desire to declare the end is understandable but he should have checked to make sure that we had actually won. The number of service men and women who have giving their lives since this is a sad commentary on Bush's lack of understanding of just what he got us into. Since the whole war in Iraq was an overblown lie and intelligence work that was nothing more than a house of cards, it is easy to understand how Bush missed that we had not yet won anything.
The saddest part of the whole adventure in Iraq is that we had no apparent plan about what to do once we had beaten the Iraqi military and toppled the government. The fact that we just stood around and watched people wreck and loot the government buildings, hospitals, museums, shops and schools showed that we had both either not expected it to happen or had no plan if they did. The fact that there was no immediate work to fix the broken infra-structure shows just how flat footed we were. I know that usually that is not the job of the military but it is the job of our Defense Department and State Department.
The fact is the military are not the people who make war, it is the civilian government. The Congress, the President and all the people that make up the State Department, Defense Department, CIA and the rest of the intelligence gathers are the ones that plan and put our military in harms way. To a man these people have let down our military. Their lack of foresight, planning or even to check their facts is one of the most criminal acts of this whole sad debacle. So on this sad anniversary let the American People demand the truth and an accounting of what has happened. Then we need a real plan, not just stay the course, that gets our men and women out of there and doesn't destabilize the region more than we have already done.