Scott Ritter, former weapons inspector, writes on Truthdig about the dismal future for the Iraqi people.

Rather than offering a word-for-word renouncement of the president’s rosy assertions concerning Iraq, I will instead initiate a process of debunking the myth of American success by doing that which no politician, current or aspiring, would dare do: predict the failure of American policy in Iraq. With the ink on the newspapers parroting the president’s words barely dry, evidence of his misrepresentation of reality begins to build with the announcement by the Pentagon that troop levels in Iraq will not be dropping, as had been projected in view of the “success” of the “surge,” but rather holding at current levels with the possibility of increasing in the future. This reversal of course concerning troop deployments into Iraq highlights the reality that the statistical justification of “surge success,” namely the reduction in the level of violence, was illusory, a temporary lull brought about more by smoke and mirrors than any genuine change of fortune on the ground. Even the word surge is inappropriate for what is now undeniably an escalation. Iraq, far from being a nation on the rebound, remains a mortally wounded shell, the equivalent of a human suffering from a sucking chest wound, its lungs collapsed and its life blood spilling unchecked onto the ground. The “surge” never addressed the underlying reasons for Iraq’s post-Saddam suffering, and as such never sought to heal that which was killing Iraq. Instead, the “surge” offered little more than a cosmetic gesture, covering the wounds of Iraq with a bandage which shielded the true extent of the damage from outside view while doing nothing to save the victim.

Iraq is dying; soon Iraq will be dead.

This report at Rawstory relates the failure of the CIA to prevent a war when it was well known there were no weapons of mass destruction. The CIA deflects responsibility thusly

Paul R. Pillar, the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the time of the operation to question Tawfiq, said weapons scientists had not been ignored, but had been contradicted by other sources.

“To the extent that the debriefings did not have more of an effect in Washington, it probably was not because the effort came too late but instead because there were other indications that seemed to contradict what the individuals were saying, and that suggested Iraqi unconventional weapons programmes were continuing,” he told AFP.

But as Saddam’s scientist lamented five years later: “You don’t have to destroy a country for that.”