The Wages of Belligerence

The Ahmadinejad in the Mirror. In an interview with C-Span yesterday, President Bush claimed that "The Iranian people are good, honest, decent people and they've got a government that is belligerent, loud, noisy, threatening--a government which is in defiance of the rest of the world and says "We want a nuclear weapon." The United States already has nuclear weapons, but the rest of the statement captures the Bush administration in a nutshell--"belligerent, loud, noisy, threatening . . . in defiance of the rest of the world." Like President Ahmadinejad, Bush is also an increasingly unpopular and isolated figure at home and responding to his isolation by increasing his belligerence . . . toward Iran.

Other People's Deaths. The advantage of being a super-power is that the United States can make other people pay the vast majority of the cost for its mistakes. In the case of the war on terror, we (and it's painful to include myself here) have made the people of Iraq pay the price for the election of our Ahmadinejad. Yesterday, car bombs in Baghdad killed 78 people to mark the anniversary of the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra. That didn't count the numbers of men and women who were assassinated by Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia. Estimates vary, but it looks like more than 100,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed that the American civil war was the price that this country paid for the sin of slavery. I wonder if there will be such an ultimate price for out invasion of Iraq.