I've done a lot of raving lately. Good to let off some steam. Good to debate and sometimes even fight about it. Despite my ravings, I love my country of course, no matter how venomous I may get. Your country couldn't make you this mad if you didn't love that country and are pained to see it behave in this fashion. Americans are well-meaning but we have to understand that is no excuse for bad results.

We can't change what's happened. We do indeed need to move forward. But when all is said and done, have Americans learned anything? That's what troubles me more than anything else. Did we learn anything from this? We paid a huge cost in Vietnam and we didn't seem to learn anything because here we are stuck where we are.

Most Americans are saying the invasion of Iraq was wrong. Are they serious? Why then did they reelect George Bush? Do most Americans truly understand WHY the Iraq invasion was wrong? It's not because we're losing (though we are), it's because we had no ethical basis for invading Iraq in the first place. Do most Americans understand that because it sure doesn't seem like it to me or how could they only just gotten around to finally deciding it was the wrong thing to do?

We're holding people without trials, without evidence. We torture them, we've shipped them to secret locations abroad to torture them there. The govt listens in on our phone calls and emails without warrants while they stuff their pockets with bribes and special interest money. Is this govt by the people and for the people? Looks like govt by the govt for the govt to me. Do we seem concerned about this? Does this seem to be a big subject around the office? Are we learning anything from this? What should we be learning from this?

I keep hearing soldiers say they don't want their buddies to have died in vain. That's certainly understandable but unfortunately for them, if they are considering some kind of victory in Iraq it's not going to happen. But that doesn't mean that our dead died in vain. Seems to me the best way not to have let these brave men and women die in vain is to remember the circumstances that led up to their needless deaths and vow with our souls to punish the wrongdoers and never repeat their vile crimes.

If we've learned something from this then I think we will have honored our dead as well as we can hope. To learn nothing from this miserable disaster is the greatest dishonor to the fallen that we can render to them and to the generations that follow. The cost has been dear and is going to climb far, far higher over the next few years. Don't let us come away from it blaming anyone but ourselves for allowing it to happen. Don't let us seek scapegoats. Let us punish the guilty and mend the holes torn in our beloved Constitution. And this time, let us truly enshrine and internalize its principles and ideas. Let us consign this period to some terrible but temporary Dark Age when we were run by a madman. Will this be what we learn from this?

Do we truly understand that, in the name of civilization, we must never again do these things?