"I Pray to God I Never See It Again'

Liberal Doomsayer ("Doomsey" to his friends) is a 40-something IT professional specializing in user interface design and web publishing who writes business and software documentation in central New Jersey. He was inspired to start his Liberal Doomsayer blog because he felt that he had to start making some kind of a contribution after many years of "watching the Republican Party (with the aid of some spineless Democrats) sell our country down the river."

The Iraq War under George W. Bush is something that, quite simply, would never have happened if we, as citizens of this country, had been properly served by the legislative and executive branches of our government. The Bush Administration concocted their threadbare case for war based on an unholy stew of strands of truth mixed with heaping quantities of debatable anecdotal evidence and outright lies. The primary responsibility for this epochal disaster lies with them, though Congress is partially responsible also for giving the executive branch a free pass in deciding to go to war, the most important decision that a government can make.
How has this changed our country?

The Iraq War has ruined the credibility of this nation in the eyes of free people everywhere who look to us as a country that encourages self government, respects the sovereignty of other nation states, honors and upholds internationally recognized treaties and protocols, and seeks to mediate conflicts throughout the world. It has decimated both the raw numbers of our armed forces and the morale of its members. It, along with the mind-bogglingly idiotic decision to pass wartime tax cuts, has thoroughly depleted the surplus which the Bush Administration inherited from its predecessor in the White House. It is something that, as I studied our nation's history in school and also took classes in civics and political science, I thought I would never ever see, and I pray to God that I never see it again.

It is a war that has been fought based on lies to expand an economic empire for the sake of a privileged few driven by our dependency on oil. As badly as it has hurt our country, it has torn apart an area of the world that was already antagonistic to us, and it will take generations to repair the destruction it has caused, assuming that that destruction can be repaired at all.