Bushie, you're doing a heckuva job

The Administration's own intelligence agencies say that the invasion has fostered radicalism in the Muslim world, and made this country less safe.

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

[snip]

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative documents that the intelligence community produces on a specific national security issue, and are approved by John D. Negroponte, director of national intelligence. Their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all of the spy agencies.

That's John "Honduran Death Squads" Negroponte, Bush's hand-picked head spook -- not a Clinton holdover, not a raging liberal, not even a nonpartisan patriot like Richard Clarke, who served Administrations of both parties. Negroponte is Bush's guy, and even HE says that the Iraq war has done nothing to address the terrorist threat, and everything to make the threat worse.

So what are the Democrats running on this year?

"I'm not him":

...and taking a giant leap forward into 1996, with "It's the Economy, Stupid!" redux -- which may be true by 2008 after the housing market finishes crashing, but it's not there yet.

And still, the Democrats are cowering in the corner about the biggest crime against humanity of the 21st century thus far -- yes, bigger than the 9/11 attacks -- which has been committed by the current President of the United States, his Vice President, and his Defense Secretary.

Both the 9/11 attacks involved invasions of countries which had done nothing to the nations of their perpetrators. But by any measure of morality you want to use, even a bigoted one that places the value of largely white American civilian life higher than that of Iraqi civilian life or the lives of the largely minority American solders, in terms of both body count and destruction of property, Bush's completely unjustified, foolhardy, and botched invasion of Iraq, now confirmed to be so by his own people, has been even more destructive than the 9/11 attacks. And what this war hasn't finished off of the great nation in which I grew up, the craven acquiescence of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner to turning what used to be a beacon of freedom to the world into just another banana republic that tortures its enemies, will.

Mission accomplished.