The talking heads use various metaphors: "It's going to be a hard road ahead."
"We're only entering the fourth quarter."

Well, we're giving the Iraqis back their country, for better or worse. Mostly worse. We've already been over how misbegotten this whole foray was, how it was the wrong war for the wrong reasons, all the blood and treasure lost in the sand.

The hard line rear guard Bush administration apologists claim that, regardless of all the bloodshed, the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam.

I wouldn't know, since I'm not there on the ground. I have a feeling they don't either. As we stand back and observe the inevitable sectarian score-settling, favoritism, corruption, and the other symptoms of a failing state as the Iraqis--who never thought of themselves as a "people," but a collection of tribes--jockey for power, we'll probably see a strong man emerge.

A populace grown weary of undending violence will turn to him for stability, and gladly trade in whatever trappings of "democracy" we bequeathed upon them at the point of the gun.

The new strong man, after all is said and done, will remind us a lot of Saddam Hussein. Maybe he won't look as ridiculous in a fedora. He'll probably deal with us on oil, because he'll need the money...which was what the whole thing was about in the first place.

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It just shows you that no matter who is in the White House, our republic--with all its awesome and high-priced might--remains at a disadvantage when it comes to asymmetrical warfare.

What do you do if you're the Taliban, you're armed with rocket-propelled grenades and maybe some old Enfield rifles the British left behind back in the Nineteenth Century, and you're fighting a foe who has precision missiles that can rain down destruction from the sky with no advance notice, obliterating an entire crowd?

You make sure the crowd he obliterates is the wrong one.

Remember, this battle is for hearts and minds, not body counts. You use jiujitsu, turning the aggressor's own bulk and momentum against him. Enough of these little mistakes, and pretty soon the whole country sees you as the heroic defender of innocent women and children.

What are a few thousand more deaths in a country that has suffered so much already, especially if they serve a strategic goal? The locals don't know the Twin Towers from the Doublemint Twins, and when you say "terrorism," they look at all the bodies of their friends and loved ones that need to be buried.

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Not to rain on President Obama's parade, but the American people (at least the current crop) do not weather hardship well. The difference between us and our forebears from the 1930's is that they never had it all that good to start with, so the Great Depression represented, for them, a more severe degree of personal restraint, not a quantum contraction of lifestyle as our current situation demands.

Our history of living high on the credit hog, those big fat cars and houses we really couldn't afford, the flat-screen TVs, the travel, the dining out, are all too vivid in our recent memory. We got used to the taste of prosperity, even if it was just a chimera. We want it back, pronto. A few more months of denial, and we're going to forget that the crash happened on George W. Bush's watch. All we'll think about is that Obama seems to be spinning his wheels at a furious pace, but we're no closer to moving back into our mcmansions.

That'll be right around when things start heating up for the off-year Congressional elections, and the Republicans will be more than happy to point out how little progress we will have made under an all-Democrat government.

How did it all begin? Heck, who will be able to remember that far back?

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It's a fitting coda to the utter pointlessness of Bush's invasion of Iraq. Even the people we liberated at the cost of so much human life and treasure are literally hurling their very worst insults at our president as he tries to run his final "victory" lap.

Bush laughed off the incident in his simple-minded way, but it really is tragic that our massive undertaking has come to this. Is there any positive outcome, anything at all, that we can point to? We got rid of Saddam. Great--Iran is taking advantage of the power vacuum, as are the various domestic Iraqi sects and factions he managed to keep in some kind of restless order.

At the very least, we were hoping to leave behind a pro-American client state in the middle of a hostile region.

Instead, the locals are hailing the shoe-thrower as a national hero.

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Here is a story that will leave you thanking your lucky stars that you are blessed to live in a functioning democracy:

I have a friend who lives in Santa Fe, NM. A lot of high-profile people either live there full time or play there part time, folks like Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson (whom my friend calls "Flake and the Cupcake"). It's a wealthy, yet quiet environment where people who value their privacy are generally left alone.

My friend was walking along Acequia Madre, a street in Santa Fe's tony East Side, about two weeks after Donald Rumsfeld, arguably the most powerful man in the world while he was in office, had been deposed as Secretary of Defense. If you remember, the pressure became so great on President Bush from all sides of the political spectrum that he finally caved and threw Rummy off the fantail.

Anyway, imagine my friend's surprise to see the former Alpha Male of Washington in well-worn jeans, ambling along the street with his dog, smoking his pipe and carrying a pooper scooper.

Eventually, the dog did his business, the erstwhile commander of the most fearsome military force on the planet scooped up the mess, and strolled off back to his home.

Think this could ever happen anywhere else?

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After Italy capitulated in World War II and then declared herself to be on the side of the Allies, Winston Churchill famously said, "With the Italians as friends, who needs enemies?"

One has to wonder what kind of foreign aid first allows the Pakistanis to export nuclear technology to our enemies, and then permits them to get huffy about U.S. incursions over a border that they are incapable of policing themselves.

Would the old Soviet Union have tolerated this kind of behavior from a client state? No howski. First, a warning--then Islamabad brulee. Certainly no more military funds.

No wonder the world has lost its respect for America when our puppets are doing all the yanking on the strings.

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It turns out this President is a lot more adroit with the English language than we thought. A timetable, as it turns out, was a "prescription for surrender." A time horizon, on the other hand, is something we can live with, particularly when a Democratic candidate seems to be gaining traction with a public tired of the war.

Not that it matters that much what he says anymore.

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That we are even discussing this scenario as a real possibility is a testament to Congress' abrogation of its Constitutional role in declaring war, and the President's eagerness to act like the very king the Founding Fathers feared.

Remember the good old days, like 1941, when FDR had to go and make an impassioned case for war before Congress would even go along? And that was after Pearl Harbor, when they actually DID something to us.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear what G.H.W. Bush has to say about how his feckless boy has taken the old man's carefully constructed web of international alliances and understandings, and just blowed 'em all up real good, like a prankster flushing a cherry bomb down the boy's room toilet. Oh, well...that's the next guy's problem.

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You'd have to be a little off to want to be President at a time like this. Fortunately, there are a lot of unrestrained egos out there. It's not hard to see the cynical plot developing on the part of the Republicans. Stay the course in Iraq that has no defined ending. Put up some doddering warhorse like McCain who will go down in flames like Bob Dole before him, and leave the impossible choices to the Democrats, who will have gotten elected on the promise that they would clean things up. The resulting chaos in the Middle East and high gas prices will guarantee G.O.P. electoral victories for decades to come.

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The risk with running a cartoon like this is that there are some younger readers who won't make the historical connection and therefore miss the point. I have to strike a delicate balance between losing some people and beating others with a sledgehammer. If you don't let the reader perform the final connection in his own head, you make him a passive observer rather than a participant in the cartoon. Obviousness is the enemy of wit.

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Yesterday, when Vice-President Cheney was asked his reaction to the fact that a majority of Americans thought the Iraq war hadn't been worth it, he answered, "So?"

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Once again, it's the economy, Stupid.

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This ran March 23, 2003, four days after Operation Iraqi Freedom began. It seemed like a nutty policy then to pass a tax cut with a war just starting. It appears even nuttier now that we know the actual cost after five years. But since the whole thing is being conducted off the books, why worry?

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We ran this cartoon on March 23, 2003, four days after the invasion of Iraq began. Stock prices soared in a patriotic wave of irrational exuberance...many felt the war would be short and sweet. "Mission Accomplished" was yet to come.

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Whaddaya know...the Iraq War started five years ago this month. I looked back in my archives and found a bunch of cartoons that were eerily prescient, under the circumstances.

This one appeared on March 26, 2003, just one week after "Shock and Awe."

I'll be bringing you more as the month progresses.

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