From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

And five years later, here we are.

There were no weapons of mass destruction. We were not greeted as lib-erators. The war did not pay for itself. The smoking gun was not a mushroom cloud. There was no connection to 9/11. The course we stayed led over a cliff.

Worse, Iraq has become a recruiting station for Islamic terrorists. One presidential candidate foresees a 100-year occupation. Electricity is still a sometime thing in Baghdad. The war that was supposed to pay for itself was recently projected to cost us $3 trillion — that’s trillion, with a “t,” that’s a three followed by 12 zeros, that’s “3 million millions.” And American forces have sustained more than 33,000 casualties, including 4,000 dead and 13,000 wounded too severely to return to action.

Pundits and politicians will spend a lot of time debating the war in Iraq on this, its fifth anniversary. They will analyze what we have achieved, pontificate on where we should go from here. I will leave those arguments to them.

Not that those are not worthy issues. But I cannot get beyond what is, for me, the one overriding truth of this war.

It should never have been fought.

Yes, I know: The point is moot. The war was fought and there is nothing we can do about it. But I submit, there is, in fact, at least one thing we must do. Learn from it.

Much has been made of the culpability of the Bush administration, of the arrogance and incompetence that midwifed this mess. Less has been made, however, of the culpability of Bush’s accomplices, the enablers and facilitators who made this misadventure possible. By which I mean you and me, the American electorate.

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