We lost the war, and we never even noticed...

Could it be that Dubbyuh has already lost the "war on terrruh" and we haven't so much as even noticed?

It all began with the disclosures of the photos from Abu Ghraib. In them, Iraqis were subjected to abuses that are almost unspeakable to Muslims. Forced to strip naked...forced to mastubate in front of other Iraqis, US MP's and MI personel, some of them women...prisoners flexi-cuffed into what are euphemistically called "stress positions"...beatings...all recorded for posterity, causing further shame for them, and outrage in the rest of the Muslim world.

Then we were confronted with the Taguba Report, the memos from Alberto Gonzales dismissing the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" and "obsolete", the definition of torture as being "pain equivalent in intensity to major organ failure or death", the IRC report that methods used to interrogate prisoners at GTMO, Abu Ghraib and other US installations were torture.

All this, taken as a whole has ensured contiuing conflict with Muslim extremists for the foreseeable future. But what makes all this even more tragic is that these actions were relegated to a far back-burner. While they are being investigated by miltary authorites, those investigators can only look down the chain of command and not up it, to where the real culpability lies. With Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, one can rest assured that no active investigation will take place that might assign blame where it truly belongs...The Oval Office.

While we are shocked by the images coming from Abu Ghraib, those images have compartmentalized prisoner abuse to a "few bad apples" at that facility, despite documented evidence of such abuses being wide-spread in Iraq and elsewhere. The abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners, a direct outgrowth of Administration policy, has raised no outrage amongst US citizens. The Administration stands, albeit delicately, clear of the fallout from these abuses. And we, the people, continue to wonder, "why do they hate us?" We've lost the war...and we never even noticed.