Above and Beyond: Five Years Later

Speaking in Baghdad a few days ago, Vice President Dick Cheney said that "If you look back on those five years it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor ... and it has been well worth the effort,". (source)

A successful endeavor?

- Suicides, family breakups, depression and social stigma are just some of the hidden legacies of the Iraq war among the more than one million US troops who have served in the campaign. (source)

- Nearly one in five of Iraq's population before the U.S.-led invasion five years ago are living as internally displaced people or refugees in other countries, a global relief agency said on Tuesday.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said the 2.7 million displaced were putting huge pressure on Iraq's shaky infrastructure and outside funding was lacking. (source)

- The humanitarian situation in post-war Iraq five years after the US-led invasion is one of the most critical in the world, the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a report late Sunday. Millions in the country had no access to drinking water, sanitation or healthcare. Decades of previous unrest and economic sanctions had exacerbated the situation, it stressed. (source)

- The Iraq war has claimed the lives of over a million Iraqis. (source)

- In his final word, the CIA’s top weapons inspector in Iraq said Monday that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction has “gone as far as feasible” and has found nothing, closing an investigation into the purported programs of Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the 2003 invasion. (source)

- Images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. (source)

- Today 29 percent of Americans say the results of the war were worth it; 64 percent say they were not. (source)

A successful endeavor?

It seems that Cheney is delusional. But then again, this is a man who still insists that Iraq had ties with Al-Qaeda ties despite the fact that an exhaustive Pentagon-sponsored review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents captured during the 2003 U.S. invasion found no evidence of such a relationship. (source)

Or maybe he meant that the war was a successful endeavor for Halliburton.

In closing ... I leave you with this youtube video ...

And a collection of drawings by the great Carlos Latuff ...