Things the President Left Out of His Big Speech

In italics, from Michael Collins at The Agonist:

THE PRESIDENT: Good evening. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq, the ongoing security challenges we face, and the need to rebuild our nation here at home. But before I do that, we need a moment of truth. The Iraq war was based on a deliberate lie involving the White House distorting the National intelligence estimate on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The report got it wrong on WMD. There were none. But it concluded that the only way the nonexistent WMD would be used against the United States was in retaliation for a US attack on Iraq that threatened Saddam Hussein. By deleting this information, the Bush-Cheney White House justified a preemptive invasion without any basis, a crime under international law that our nation helped establish after World War II.

We’re treating the signature wounds of today’s wars -- post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury -- while providing the health care and benefits that all of our veterans have earned. These veterans and all those lost and injured would be here today, never have needed treatment were it not for the illegal invasion. As a result, I'm appointing one of the nation's greatest prosecutors, Vincent Bugliosi, to prosecute those responsible for the injuries and deaths of all U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq.

More.

I think we learned something very valuable from Bush's Criminal War: If you're going to lie the nation into an an unnecessary war of criminal aggression, it's important to fearmonger the citizenry into a stinky lather, yes, but it's much more important to scare the crap outta the politicians whom they vote for, very few of whom will do the right thing when their seat on the gravy train might be put at risk.

One question for President Obama about something else that was noticeably not in his speech: Besides staggering debt, the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people, and the unbridled scorn of the rest of the world, what did we GAIN from the Iraq clusterfuck?

[Crickets]

Update:

A word about the final outcome of the monumental neocon blunder of Iraq as I see it.

The 50,000 American troops still in theater are there ostensibly to 'advise and assist' and will no doubt do that to the best of their considerable ability, but they remain there as a tripwire to try to keep Iran from waltzing into Iraq right now as the victor claiming its spoils, much the same function as our troops in South Korea have had for 57 years.

Once they are gone at the end of next year, the best we can hope for is that Iran will wait a decent interval so that the fall of Iraq will not be blamed directly on us, though it will be and rightly so. The mostly Sunni Arab world will not be happy when the Persian Shiites are strengthened by 20-something-million more Shiites. Your guess is as good as mine about what may happen next. It will not be pleasant.

Note to the American embassy in Baghdad: build more helipads in anticipation of the final comparison of Iraq to Vietnam. See Fall of Saigon.