Mission Accomplished?

One cannot forget when the President of the United States stood upon a battleship dressed in a flight uniform and pronounced to a rapt crowd, "Mission Accomplished". The euphoria of that day denoted that the conflict in Iraq was over. The "Shock and Awe" that rained bombs upon Baghdad in a firey display had demonstrated the power of American supremacy. In the perception of the past, Mr. Bush and Co. thought it was going to be easy. It was as good as taking the oil and running away with giving another country some much needed "democracy" to boot.

Boy, he was wrong. What the past proclamation did was awaken a "sleeping giant". If you fast forward today, recruitment for Al Qaeda is higher. The Iraqi people are in the midst of civil war between the different religious sects in their own country. And the "insurgents" began to wage a war against the occupation that has decimated their country.

Mr. Bush--allegedly in the height of the "We're number one!" business--didn't perceive that acts of aggression have real effects. Not everyone is going to take what America is going to give hook, line and sinker. Due to foreign policies that flew in the face of the diplomacy in the past, we are not "number one" in the eyes of the world. In fact, a lot of people overseas question the judgement of the American people for voting in such a man and adopting his policies.

For the rest of us who question the policies that were laid out from the "Mission Accomplished" stance, we also had to put up with the calls of being "liberal" and "unpatriotic". After all, anyone who would feel a little put off from the orgiastic display of that day, would not be for America, right?

Six years down the road and four years of warfare in Iraq have slowly bubbled to the surface. It seems that the evidence, propaganda and testaments to the "good we're doing over there" has run false. It's not so much to say that "we told you so." But now come the time that we've got to work from the the legacy of what happened in order to repair our reputation and end the conflicts that have done so much damage overseas.

It has been said here over the past few months that we need oversight committees. We definitely do. We need investigations into the reasons of the Iraq war, especially concentrating on the evidence and how it was allegedly falsified. It needs to be put into the national record so that citizens in the future can read how not to trust the fate of the nation into the hands of those who don't have our best interests at heart. Furthermore, these records would stand as a testament of a dark time in American society, in which the soul of the nation was lost to the corporation.

The money that was spent on a war based on lies could only show us that we need to urge Congress to keep on threatening to cut off the money. Congress, not the President, has the power of the purse. And even though Mr. Bush is going to veto this bill, they have to have the courage to keep on pushing it. If one would think back a little further about the circumstances that ended the Vietnam War, it was Congressional power of the purse that provided one of the causes to end the fighting.

Despite the current Administration's push toward Executive Privilege, Congress still has a few Aces in their pockets. Play them and relieve the rest of us from enduring the aftermath of bad leadership.