Happy Anniversary, Georgie!

"My fellow citizens, at this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger."

Three years ago tomorrow, George W. Bush said these fateful words and started the campaign that, we were told, would be "a cakewalk". Three years on, Iraq is a bloody mess teetering on the brink of civil war.

Happy anniversary Georgie!

The myriad of lies and half truths that were used to justify this neo-con invasion, now lie around their ankles like a whore's knickers.

Indeed, the whole neo-con philosophy is exposed as intellectually bankrupt, deserted by even it's once most vocal supporters. The Prince of Darkness, Richard Perle, the man who promised that "if we just do it, future generations will write songs about us", now states that the Bush administration got "the aftermath wrong. We should have understood that we needed Iraqi partners."

William Buckley Jnr. now admits, "One can't doubt the objective in Iraq has failed ... Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an army of 130,000 Americans. Different plans have to be made. And the kernel here is the acknowledgement of defeat."

Even neo-conservative icon Francis Fukuyama has joined the swelling ranks of Americans judging Georgie's invasion of Iraq a disaster. Like the Leninists of old, he writes, the neo-conservatives reckoned they could drive history forward with the right mixture of power and will. However, "Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States."

Conservative columnist George Will glumly concludes that all three members of the original "axis of evil" - not only Iran and North Korea but also Iraq - "are more dangerous than when that term was coined in 2002".

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld now stand alone, sounding slightly insane as they continue to apply the sticking plaster of optimistic spin to the gaping wound that is the reality of Iraq.

I wonder if Cheney would still stand by his proclamation of May 2005 that, "The insurgency is in it's last throes"? Sadly, unable to admit the carnage that their dreadful lies have led us to, he probably would.

Bush continues his rather deranged habit of insisting that he will "honour the dead" by "completing the mission", obviously oblivious to the fact that the mission has already failed and the war is long lost.

Having failed to find the WMD that was the supposed reason for the war in the first place, Bush transfered his justification to the exporting of "democracy" (WMD = We Meant Democracy) but even this has failed, resulting in a Shia dominated parliament, naturally aligned to Bush's enemy Iran, and unable to form a government.

Over two thousand young, vibrant, American lives have been snuffed out, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis lie dead. And for what?

There is no single measure in Iraq that is better now than it was three years ago. There is less electricity, less oil and more violence. And, despite all George's spin, despite all Rumsfeld's bluster, despite all Cheney's sneering arrogance, that violence continues to grow with each month that passes and with no end in sight.

And, of course, it is not only Iraq that has been destroyed by this neo-con misadventure; the whole notion of the US as the world's sole hyper-power, the belief that the US is so strong that she can take on any enemy, is shattered by the undeniable truth that she actually lacks the strength to impose order on a nation the size of Iraq, a nation that was already on it's knees after twelve years of punative sanctions.

Inevitably, emboldened by this realisation, regimes like Iran and North Korea defy world opinion and effectively give the US the middle finger by openly pursuing their nuclear ambitions, safe in the knowledge that US forces are too stretched to ever be used against them.

This weakening of American power is the reality we face on this third anniversary of George's illegal and immoral war.

Acts of terrorism worldwide are on the increase, America is weaker than she was three years ago - her enemies are emboldened - and Iraq is ablaze, teetering on the brink of civil war.

Happy anniversary, Georgie.