Another Day, Another Speech, Another 80 Executions

Monday found President Bush giving the same speech about Iraq that he's given for the last three years. It's designed to gain a political advantage rather than reveal a strategy. Americans haven't bought it for months and they're not buying it now. Perhaps that's because Americans are literate and can read:

Police found the bodies of at least 85 people killed by execution-style shootings in the past 24 hours -- a gruesome wave of apparent sectarian reprisal slayings, officials said Tuesday.

People being pulled from their homes for no other reason than their religious identity, killed, and dumped into a ditch or hung from lamp posts. A lot of people like to make parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, but it sounds like the Balkans to me. We have mass ethnic cleansing taking place here. And Donald Rumsfeld affirmed the other day that US forces would not intervene in a civil war. In other words, after invading a country for what eventually turned out to be humanitarian reasons (we have to liberate the Iraqi people!), we will decline to intervene when that invasion causes a humanitarian crisis. This is the lack of accountability Presidency.

p.s. Read this report about how the British knew that the Coalition Provisional Authority was a mess, with Britain's envoy to Baghdad citing "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis." History will be very cruel to that period of time, right after "Mission Accomplished." That's when we lost this war.