Mission Accomplished

Happy Anniversary!

Yes, 5 years ago manly George Bush strode onto that aircraft carrier in his flight suit and codpiece and made the national media swoon.

Chris Matthews on MSNBC called Bush a “hero” and boomed, “He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics.” PBS' Gwen Ifill said Bush was “part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.” On NBC, Brian Williams gushed, "The pictures were beautiful. It was quite something to see the first-ever American president on a -- on a carrier landing. This must be very meaningful to the United States military."

When Bush’s jet landed on an aircraft carrier, American casualties stood at 139 killed and 542 wounded.

We were also apparently going to shrink to two divisions by the fall of 2003. And Maureen Dowd told us that Bush was dead sexy and the greatest American since Gary Cooper (or Tom Cruise!):

The tail hook caught the last cable, jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds. Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.

He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max with joystick politics. Compared to Karl Rove’s ‘‘revvin’ up your engine’’ myth-making cinematic style, Jerry Bruckheimer’s movies look like Lizzie McGuire.

This time Maverick didn’t just nail a few bogeys and do a 4G inverted dive with a MiG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning.

Apparently these people still sleep at night.

It didn't work out as planned, by the way, because it could NEVER work out. Occupying a country in the Middle East, destroying their infrastructure and stirring up all sorts of sectarian resentments was doomed to failure. It wasn't that we were simply incompetent (though we were), it wasn't that if we did a couple things better it would have turned out fabulous. The war was predicated on a fiction, and afterwards the Shiites were going to persecute the Sunnis as retribution, and nobody was going to tolerate an occupier.

While the media continues to talk about random pastors (you go, John Kerry!), we are stuck in Iraq with no end in sight, with no good options left, 4,000 American soldiers dead, 30,000 wounded, maybe 200,000 Iraqis dead or more, 4.7 million Iraqis displaced, trillions of dollars spent, and a nation tarnished.

UPDATE: This is from Democratic House candidate Eric Massa: