Another Unhappy Milestone: 3,000 U.S. Soldiers Dead Now In Iraq War

Well, Mr. Bush, you certainly know how to ring in a new year, with the official Pentagon-admitted figure of 3,000 U.S. soldiers dead in your cooked Iraq War.

But, of course, it's not just our young men and women dying. British and other soldiers die there, too, but in nowhere near the numbers of Iraqi civilians.

In fact, you have the rather audacious "honor" of killing more Iraqis - directly and indirectly - than Saddam Hussein did in crimes for which he was hanged until he was dead early Saturday morning.

I often wonder what Saddam might have been able to tell us about the Ronald Reagan-George Bush I years, when these highly questionable American presidents were propping up Saddam, arming him with the very weapons he used to torture and murder.

I also wonder what Saddam might have been able to say about the late 1990s and 2000 when Dick Cheney, then CEO of Halliburton, appeared before the Senate to insist sanctions be ended against Saddam and Iraq so Halliburton could sell even more weaponry and other goods there than it had already sold, illegally, under the table, in the decade since those sanctions were put in place. Once you got into office, however, Cheney couldn't wait to call Saddam the "evil enemy" and pretend like he'd never called the man a friend, which indeed he had before.

What a legacy, George. Only you and your parents can be proud of this.