And it's only going to get worse

It's going to be very difficult for Bush to still play the "Saddam was a very bad man" card anymore -- not when his own actions in Iraq have resulted in even more brutal conditions:

The republic of fear is born again. The state of terror now gripping Iraq is as bad as it was under Saddam Hussein. Torture in the country may even be worse than it was during his rule, the United Nation's special investigator on torture said yesterday.

"The situation as far as torture is concerned now in Iraq is totally out of hand," said Manfred Nowak. "The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it had been in the times of Saddam Hussein."

The report, from an even-handed senior UN official, is in sharp contrast with the hopes of George Bush and Tony Blair, when in 2003 they promised to bring democracy and respect for human rights to the people of Iraq. The brutal tortures committed in the prisons of the regime overthrown in 2003 are being emulated and surpassed in the detention centres of the present US- and British-backed Iraqi government. "Detainees' bodies show signs of beating using electric cables, wounds in different parts of their bodies including in the head and genitals, broken bones of legs and hands, electric and cigarette burns," the human rights office of the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq says in a new report.

[snip]

One US Army major was quoted as saying that Baghdad is now a Hobbesian world where everybody is at war with everybody else and the only protection is self-protection.

Iraq is in a state of primal anarchy. Paradoxically, the final collapse of security this summer is masked from the outside world because the country is too dangerous for journalists to report what is happening. Some 134 journalists, mostly Iraqi, have been killed since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.

The continuing rise in the number of civilians killed violently in Iraq underlines the failure of the new Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki installed in May after intense US and British pressure. The new government shows no signs of being more effective than the old. "It is just a government of the Green Zone," said an Iraqi official, referring to the fortified zone in central Baghdad housing the Iraqi government as well as the US and British embassies.

In an attempt to regain control of the capital and reduce sectarian violence, government and US troops launched "Operation Together Forward" in mid-July, but it seems to have had only marginal impact for a couple of weeks. The number of civilians killed in July was 3,590 and fell to 3,009 in August but was on the rise again at the end of the month.

Nice work, George. Soldiers and the Iraqi "troops" we're training are taking a page from your book and have adopted torture as a matter of routine.

Last week, this bloodthirsty lunatic of a man who sits in the White House said at a news conference that it's "unacceptable to think" that anything we do is as bad as the terrorists. Well, guess what, Georgie -- I'm not only thinking it, I'm saying it. You ARE as bad as Saddam Hussein. You haven't started looking to slake your blood lust here yet, but perhaps that's only because you've been able to turn the entire Iraqi population into the equivalent of the frogs you use to take such joy in blowing up when you were a boy.