Disclaimer: I am a patriotic free thinking non politically affiliated American who disagrees with this big spending, special interest pandering administration. When I say administration, I am not referring to the Republican party, because as I understand it, Republicans are for small government and protecting civil rights.

I find it awfully embarassing that we are now in a position that we have to go to the UN for help. The organization that the administration threatened would become irrelevant if it didn't authorize the invasion of Iraq, is now being asked to assist us in cleaning up what we have wrought there. Saddam is a bad guy, but if we weren't in such an all fired hurry to go ff half cocked and invade, maybe we could have sone a better job and not have created a lawless terrorist no man's land. Which is better? A merciless brutal dictatorship or a chaotic land that attracts terrorists from all over the world filled with illegal arms. Zero sum gain in my opinion.

Here's an excerpt from an article from some guy in Salon (?) named Gary Kamiya. Its too happy about our current situation for my taste, but that doesn't make it any less impactful. It'll probably make MikeMover and Piotr's heads explode (i.e. they really won't like it).

"Would you like some freedom fries with your crow, Mr. President?"

"Let me make sure I've got this right. After being insulted, belittled and called irrelevant by the swaggering machos in the Bush administration, the United Nations is now supposed to step forward to supply cannon fodder for America's disastrous Iraq occupation -- while the U.S. continues to run the show?

"In other words, the rest of the world is to send its troops to get killed so that a U.S. president it fears and despises can take the credit for an invasion it bitterly opposed.

"The rest of the world may be crazy, but it ain't stupid.

"The Bush administration's humiliating announcement that it wants the U.N. to bail it out officially confers the title of 'debacle' upon the grand Cheney-Rove-Wolfowitz adventure. Not even the world-class chutzpah of this administration can conceal the fact that by turning to the despised world body, it is eating a heaping plate of crow. This spectacle may give Bush-bashers from London to Jakarta a happy jolt of schadenfreude, but it does nothing to help Americans who are stuck with the ugly fallout of the Bush team's ill-conceived, absurdly overoptimistic attempt to redraw the Middle East.

"The bitter truth is that everything the administration told us about Iraq has turned out to be false."