Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld

Slate: Opinion: Jamelle Bouie: The Neocons Already Destroyed Iraq Once

There’s an old American expression “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. Which basically translates if you are dumb enough to get fooled multiple times by the same person, you are a fool who deserves to be fooled. The Neoconservatives lost the argument over Iraq as early as early as 2006 when their Republican allies in Congress were kicked out of the House and Senate because of Iraq and how badly the Bush Administration botched that war and occupation. And for all the Republican support and American tax dollars to pay for those failures.

And because of all of this and the trillions of dollars added to the national debt and the thousands of lives America has lost in Iraq and the millions of lives Iraq has lost in Iraq a country of twenty-five-million people. Not a large country America except for portions of the Far-Right has no interest in going back in and trying to save a country from itself. Iraq has been left up to Iraq which was an original goal of the Bush Administration that the Obama Administration followed through on. Because they wanted to get us the hell out of Iraq a situation they knew couldn’t be fixed by Americans themselves.

Iraq now has a functioning federal government and military even as flawed as it is. But at least it represents Iraq and they have the responsibility to govern and defend themselves. And if they aren’t willing to live up to their own responsibilities they can’t expect Americans to do that for them and be left with the bill for those operations.