Today marks five years since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. In five years, Iraq has yet to embrace the democracy we were told would follow within months of our arrival. In five years, more than 2 million Iraqi innocents have fled, some coming home to find bullets wrapped in bloody cloth on the windshields of their cars - an order from the sectarian militias that rule the streets to leave, or face the consequences. In five years, the city of Baghdad has watched the construction of the American embassy in the heavily fortified and insulated Green Zone, even as beyond the barricades Iraqi residents wait for the water, utilities and essential infrastructure promised them by their “liberators.”

In many ways, the tragedy of Iraq is painfully reminiscent of this country’s most shameful missteps: our deception and brutality in confronting American Indians, our despicable hypocrisy in exercising slavery, our persecution and imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, our institutional hatred and prejudices aimed at African Americans, and even now, our unjust prosecution of “enemy combatants,” held without trial and made to suffer the indignities of sensory deprivation, water-boarding and psychological abuse.

The comparison to ancient Rome is apt; our nation - its unquenched thirst for empire paid in blood - crumbles from within.

What goes around, comes around.

In five years, only 28% of Americans know that nearly 4,000 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq. After five years of being told by our inept leadership that there was a definitive link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda, a Pentagon-sponsored review of over 600,000 documents has found “no smoking gun.” Nevertheless, an administration of deceit continues to deliver false claims: Vice President Cheney reasserted the discredited claim that there existed a “clear” connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda this very week.

To date, this war of unprovoked and unwarranted aggression has cost the United States more than $500 billion, even as the national economy teeters on the verge of recession. By the time all combat troops withdraw from Iraq, the war’s total cost may exceed $1 trillion.

To think that Saddam Hussein and the unsophisticated Iraqi army could have inflicted upon the U.S. more than $500 billion in damage or claimed more than 4,000 American lives - especially considering the fact that U.N. and U.S. inspectors have been unable to find any definitive evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq since the beginning of the war - is unrealistic.

And while it is true that there has not been a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, tens of thousands of Iraqi, U.S. and foreign civilians have been killed in Iraq as a consequence of the invasion in 2002. This doesn’t begin to cover the untold thousands more who have been killed in the greater Middle East as a result of increased regional tension.

This doesn’t begin to cover the unprecedented number of combat veterans either injured or suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and struggling to obtain treatment in an underfunded and chronically neglected military health care system.

Despite this, our president says “Bring ‘em on” - he having never served a single day in an active combat zone: America’s most Fortunate Son.

In the Oscar-nominated documentary “No End in Sight” - former Ambassador Barbara Bodine reveals that U.S. planning for post-war Iraq was not commenced until just weeks before the invasion. The Pentagon office designated for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, Bodine recollects, was void of chairs, desks and computers.

As Bodine says, the U.S. government failed to realize it couldn’t do “regime change without nation-building.”

5 years later, the National Intelligence Estimate determined, the war in Iraq has worsened the terrorism threat to the United States. The classified report “attributes a more direct role to the Iraq War in fueling radicalism than that presented in…recent White House documents,” according to the New York Times.

What the people of the United States swore they would never do again in the aftermath of Vietnam, we have done again. What our government promised it would do in serving the American people, it has failed, pursuing a “stay the course” attitude of ignorance, deception and malice.

What is more, is the unbelievable squandering of international goodwill and American diplomatic capital by our present leadership following the cataclysmic events of Sept. 11.

“We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail,” said the president in the wake of the attack.

President Bush: We have tired, we have faltered, and you, sir, have failed.

The time is now to end this unjust war.

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