The library also "includes interactive role-playing," says Colbert, "where the president hands over the reins of power to someone else--just like he did when he was president. It's like a presidential 'Choose Your Own Adventure.'"

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Now, on the eve of the opening of his presidential library and an apparent Bush-rehabilitation tour, starting with a Diane Sawyer interview Wednesday night, Bush faces a kinder, gentler American public. According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, Americans are now split on the former president, with 47 percent approving of his performance and 50 percent disapproving. He’s still underwater, as the pollsters say, but that’s not a bad jump in four years. He’s even climbed on the economy, with 43 percent now approving of the job he did, while 57 percent stayed tethered to the reality-based community, and still disapprove.

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It does not diminish the horror of mass casualty attacks on civilians, in this and other countries, to point out that today’s terrorist incidents provide a counterpoint to a declining arc of political violence worldwide. Both violence among states and violence within states have diminished dramatically in the last few generations.

If we look at battle deaths in the last century, the spurts in the Cold War, associated with the Korean, Indochina and Soviet-Afghan wars, were dwarfed by the huge spikes of slaughter associated with the world wars. And with the end of the Cold War came a steep decline in political violence worldwide — mainly because the two sides no longer kept local conflicts going by arming and supplying opposing sides from Latin America to Africa to Asia and the Middle East.

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Forget the fact that Iraq had no part in 9/11; the United States had planted its flag in the heart of the Middle East, from whence, roughly, the hijackers came. The media dutifully praised the symbolism of the moment as the Saddam statue was then toppled by an oversize military tow truck. On CNN, Bill Hemmer said the scene brought to mind “indelible moments like the fall of the Berlin Wall,” and Wolf Blitzer declared it “the image that sums up the day and, in many ways, the war itself.”

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Via the Guardian:

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1) "I have made the position of the United States of America clear: Iran must not get a nuclear weapon. This is not a danger that can be contained. As President, I have said to the world that all options are on the table for achieving our objectives. America will do what we must to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran."

2) "One thing is certain. The United States should never allow Iran to threaten the world with a nuclear bomb."

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Salon's Alex Pareene pointed out that in a video segment to commemorate the Iraq War, Scarborough had said in a voice-over that "the very same people who spent years beating up George Bush were the very ones beating the drum for Iraq's regime change and Saddam Hussein's ouster." The video then shows Pelosi saying, "I applaud the president's focusing on this issue, and on taking the lead to disarm Saddam Hussein," but leaves out her remarks afterward that "I rise in opposition to this resolution on national security grounds."

"In fact, it seems like she got it just about right," Scarborough said in Thursday's segment, as he and Brzezinski apologized.

Watch:

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“Are you nervous?” I ask.

“A little bit,” he says, as we walk through a rainy morning toward the courthouse.

On the way his father calls to check in, and to share news from home. Multiple bombings in Baghdad. More than 60 dead. “He’s on old man now, he deserves to live in peace.” Abraham sighs, and lights a cigarette as we cross busy Jay Street and turn the corner toward Cadman Plaza, heading toward the Theodore Roosevelt Federal Courthouse, a shiny new building a few blocks from the Brooklyn Bridge. “But just for this one morning I feel like acting like a selfish American. I don’t want to worry about it. I want to be happy.”

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(A reminder of Rummy's promise that it would be a "short war":)

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To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

 

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The Russert segment is sort of bizarre, referring to "that big anniversary" and completely ignoring the reasons the Iraq War started. It concludes -- after Engel explains how Iraq is once again in a sectarian civil war -- with Russert essentially asserting the inevitability of a military strike against Iran, saying they could be "months" away from building nuclear weapons.

Here's the Morning Joe segment. It's long, but well worth watching. Bob Woodward's presence adds a note of dark comedy to the proceedings. No one bothers to mention any of his horrible pre-war punditry, or his culpability for the misleading journalism the Washington Post was producing at the time.

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Number of Iraqi civilians dead as a consequence: At minimum, between 123,000 and 134,000

Number of Iraqis internally displaced or who fled the country: 2.8 million (that's one in 12 Iraqis)

Number of U.S. troop casualties: 4,484

Number of coalition troop casualties: 4,803

Number of U.S. troops wounded: 32,223

Number of non-Iraqi contractors killed: at least 463

Number of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnoses in U.S. service members: 103,792

Number of bombs dropped in Shock and Awe Campaign: 4,845

U.S. financial cost so far: $1.7 trillion

Amount owed to U.S. veterans in benefits: $490 billion

Predicted cost to U.S. over next four decades: $6 trillion

Cost of U.S. reconstruction efforts: $60 billion

Amount of reconstruction effort funds wasted: over $8 billion

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To answer this question, one obvious place to start is school textbooks. I looked at several of them, and was happily surprised. The books present a fairly complex and balanced view of the war in Iraq, avoiding the falsehoods and sugarcoating that has so often marred American history instruction. But textbooks only tell part of the story.

Just as important is what is actually emphasized in the classrooms, and the ability of teachers to engage in real inquiry. Unfortunately, a combination of school policies and judicial decisions have made it so that many kids learn little or nothing about what we have done in Iraq, or why we have done it.

I’m a professor of education and history, and wrote a book examining conflicts over history in American public schools. But for me, this probe is more than theoretical: My daughter is an 11th grader in a suburban public high school, where she takes Advanced Placement U.S. History.

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The attacks show how dangerous and unstable Iraq remains a decade after the war — a country where sectarian violence can explode at any time. And though attacks have ebbed since the peak of the insurgency in 2006 and 2007, tensions simmer and militants remain a potent threat to Iraq's security forces.

Tuesday's attacks were mostly by car bombs and targeted mainly Shiite areas, small restaurants, day laborers and bus stops in the Iraqi capital and nearby towns over a span of more than two hours.

Along with 56 killed, over 200 people were wounded in the attacks, officials said.

The bombings came 10 years to the day that Washington announced the start of the invasion on March 19, 2003 — though by that time it was already the following morning in Iraq.

Also on Tuesday, Iraq's Cabinet decided to postpone upcoming provincial elections in two provinces dominated by the country's minority Sunnis for up to six months. The decision followed requests from the political blocs in the provinces, according to the prime minister's spokesman, Ali al-Moussawi.

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From the distant land called Washington, D.C., we’d heard the rumble of war-mongering getting louder every day. And now, the inevitable was upon us. For weeks, George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein had engaged in a stare-down contest. Neither one had blinked and now their eyeballs were all dried out, thanks to their resolve, hubris and, in at least one case, outright insanity. Bush had given Iraq a 48-hour warning, clicking a political stopwatch to life.

As the hour neared, there was something approaching a party atmosphere in the U.S. Army Alaska headquarters building where I worked. Voices rose in pitch. Tight laughter punctuated conversations. Senior officers swaggered down the hallways. At last, at last, all their military training would be put to good use.

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Back in 2003, the madness and magic of the times had just broken loose after the dramatic Hollywood-like toppling of the dictator's statue in Baghdad and the endless chain reaction it started. Suddenly, we were faced with the full dread of that moment of existential impasse: the evaporation of the regime and all its apparatuses. Imagine that you wake up one fine April morning to find that all the cops, soldiers, Baathists, officials – everyone down to traffic officers and street sweepers vanished with a slight gesture from the hand of a mighty Yankee sorcerer. In truth, they simply left or took to hiding, fearing revenge or the impending meting out of American justice. Khaki clothes and weapons abandoned on streets were common sights, but they did not compare to the arresting scenes of children playing on abandoned ordnance and tanks. The thunder of air raids was silenced, except in the restless dreams of those same children.

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Denouncing the social media tool's tendency to produce what he called mean and shallow commentary, Keller lamented Twitter's suddenly pervasive power. "It is always on, and it gets inside your head," he wrote, adding, "there is no escape." Indeed, within days of writing his column, Keller felt compelled to pen a lengthy piece about his Twitter encounter.

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Americans' negative view of the war reached its high point in 2008, when 63 percent said it was a mistake.

From Gallup:

Americans initially supported the war, with substantial majorities in 2003 saying the U.S. decision to get involved in Iraq was not a mistake. However, attitudes changed relatively quickly, and by the summer of 2004, a majority of Americans called the war a mistake.

Opinions fluctuated somewhat thereafter but, with one exception, since August 2005, a majority has said the war was a mistake each time Gallup has asked the question -- and at several points, more than 60% said so. The last time Gallup asked this question, in August 2010, 55% called the war a mistake.

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