How Dare They Don't Appreciate Lying In A Puddle Of Their Own Sick

So Bob Woodward has a new book out. It's the usual compendium of "inside the palace" gossip and amazing revelations that upon further inspection aren't usually all that revelatory. For instance, it's interesting that Bush thinks the Iraqis are ingrates, but he's actually said this publicly and privately on a few other occasions, and it's been reported thusly.

Still, the shock of that perspective never fails to wear off:

WOODWARD: He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, ‘I don’t understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we’ve done for them,’ namely liberated them.

PELLEY: But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn’t understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?

WOODWARD: His beacon is liberation. He thinks we’ve done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position.

Never mind the dead, the wounded, the displaced. Can't they feel the warm wind of freedom at their backs now? Or maybe that's the queasy feeling of disease:

Cholera has broken out in a province south of Baghdad and at least 20 cases of the waterborne disease have been confirmed there, a Health Ministry official said Monday.

However, local authorities in Babil province insist the real figure is much higher and have complained that the government in Baghdad has been slow in responding to the outbreak.

Health Ministry official Dr. Ihsan Jaafar said the figure of confirmed cases was based on an examination of samples taken from the victims over the last week. He said one death — a 60-year-old man — had been confirmed [...]

Cholera is endemic in Iraq, which lacks facilities to supply clean drinking water, especially in the countryside. Last year, a cholera outbreak in northern Iraq killed 14 people.

So five years after invasion and occupation, Iraqis are dying from filthy water, which we haven't managed to provide yet. And the clueless Boy King wonders why they're not sufficiently grateful of our fine work blowing up their buildings and switching a Sunni strongman for a Shiite one. "The nerve of them!" he must think.

By all rights, this should be an issue in the campaign. We bombed a country that did not attack us, overthrew their leaders, and did so little for their infrastructure and political stability that the new regime is at an impasse and kids are dying of cholera. And this is the foreign policy John McCain wants to ape.

Of course, there are a lot of things that should be an issue in this campaign...