Vanity of vanities - the Iraq War seven years later

We are still shocked. We were never awed. We have not adjusted. The senseless waste of our blood and treasure, our honor and our reputation continue. Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom - the latter unleashed seven years ago today - have morphed into a single Operation Enduring Occupation, set to bankrupt this country financially as well as morally, to destroy our own security as it has that of the over 31 million people who populate Iraq and 32 million people of Afghanistan. Operations sold to the American people as protecting our freedoms have been used as part of a corrupt apparatus - like every other protection racket since the beginning of time - to restrict, reduce and infringe on those freedoms, not only the civil liberties enshrined in the early English common law (habeas corpus, trial by jury ) and the Constitution's Bill of Rights (free speech, free association, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment), but also our so-called freedom to shop (the "ultimate repudiation of terrorism" dixit George Bush), undermined not only by the financial collapse and ensuing economic crisis, but also by the inviolability of the federal military budget. Our language has been deformed ("Homeland," "preventative war," "enemy combatant," "enhanced interrogation," "freedom," "security"); our society, militarized and privatized - with the legitimate government monopoly on violence outsourced to military contractors.