Three Thousand American Lives for Nothing

I was apprehensive about the execution of Hussein on such short notice. Too many things to go terribly wrong and, begotten on video by a no doubt unauthorized phone, reality ends up being broadcast around the world on video.

Hussein's execution was nothing less than a lynching. A half dozen men in ski masks can be heard taunting him moments before his death chanting their allegiance to Muktada Al Sadyr, a dangerous Shiite fanatic that is overly impressed with the sound of his own voice and ignorant of the innocents sacrificed by the tone of his fervor. This was a gang slaying and our administration is characterizing it as justice.

We have lost 3,000 American lives for nothing. There are no weapons of mass destruction, there never were. There have been far more lives lost in Iraq as a result of the American led invasion that there would have been otherwise, there is a civil war blooming with no end in sight and we have denied our own economy the benefit of what will ultimately amount to over 1 trillion dollars.

To many it is beginning to occur that our country is being led into wars by self serving morons; people who could not pass a high school equivalency test on foreign policy are starting wars on groundless basis and we acquiesce to their evolutionary rhetoric; "we have done the right thing".

Afghanistan should have taught us that we can win battles but not the will of people with our weaponry. New and used radical groups continue to attack anybody and everybody for the sake of acknowledgement and survival. We are just not listening. We have not even been able to impact the production of heroin yet we continue to expand our conflict in the region.

Saddam's execution turned out to be a true measure of our failure in Iraq and it was undeniably a debacle on par with our reasoning for being there in the first place. This is a time that we need to hold our administration accountable and defer to wiser experience than our own. We owe it to the citizens of Iraq and the security of their future.