Thanks, George W. Bush, You Blew Up the Middle East

Mission accomplished? W. didn't know the half of it.

It's broadly accepted that invading Iraq may be the single worst foreign-policy blunder, at least in recent memory, by an American president (for fun, look at it from a British perspective). As the growing Sunni-Shia conflict, with Saudi Arabia and Iran engaging in a growing proxy war in the Middle East, gets worse, we should remember that Bush blew the lid off Pandora's Box by destroying the firewall that was Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It's beyond irony that Ronald Reagan helped Hussein build and maintain that firewall. Equally mind-boggling is that Donald Rumsfeld and Bush's father were very much at the center of Reagan's support of Hussein.

Though Barack Obama may appear to be lurching from one ineffective military or diplomatic response to another -- all in the main an attempt to preserve the flow of oil while avoiding boots on the ground, by the way -- we shouldn't forget that this is essentially an ad hoc attempt to outmaneuver George W. Bush's legacy.

Bush's dumb-and-dumber pugilism is the gift that keeps on giving. Saudi Arabia, and now potentially Egypt, fighting Iranian interests is Yemen? Smart people saw this coming.

And now the GOP-controlled Congress demands reductions in any social spending to offset a large -- and largely unnecessary -- increase in defense spending. Great set of priorities you've got there.

Let's manage the Middle East with diplomacy and aid to the refugee problem we've helped cause and get our military out of there. Why? Tell me one thing we're accomplishing that won't vanish or degrade whether we stay there or not.

It takes a village idiot to explain the good we've done there. We should have never left!

These people also did the other thing: Building the rationale for torture, and then unleashing it.

Note. This is slightly off-topic, but this piece by Greg Mitchell on last year's anniversary of "Mission Accomplished Day" is both stunning and revolting.