We haven't blogged about Iraq in a while, but do we really need to? Is their some surfeit of good news that's changed the validity of including Iraq in this administration's giant failures list? Clearly not. Now we hear that torture in Iraq is worse than under Saddam.

Friday I was watching Real Time with Bill Maher and as usual he had a token apologist for the administration's policies that was better for generating laughs than any joke he could come up with. One of the constant rebuttals to the liberal arguments that Iraq was a mistake was that Saddam was so bad. Sigh.

Not only is the situation we've created actually worse than Saddam, but the argument fails under the most superficial scrutiny. We oppose Saddam, fine. He was an asshole, sure. So are a lot of people though. Kim Jong Il is worse. But even more depressing, a lot of our allies in the War on Terra are about a billion times worse. I'm talking about you Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. I hear the Uzbeks boil people, and the president of Turkmenistan not only massacres dissedents but creates golden statues of himself that follow the sun and has created a religion around his cult of personality.

So, yeah, Saddam sucked (mostly in the 80s when we supported him no less), but what is truly embarrassing is that the American occupation has sucked worse. Not only is torture now reinstated, but in classic propaganda fasion we've been fudging statistics of deaths in Iraq to make our occupation appear less devastating.

We were puzzled when figures from the Baghdad morgue showed only a 15 percent drop in the number of violent deaths it saw in August. But we're not puzzled anymore. As the Associated Press reports, Caldwell was able to come up with such a low number of "murders" in Baghdad in August by simply excluding from his count people killed by "bombs, mortars, rockets or other mass attacks -- including suicide bombings."

The argument over whether this was a mistake is now over. Saddam was an asshole, yes, but we're as bad or worse. We lose men, money, and credibility as a result of this war. We lost the initiative in actually capturing or killing our real enemies in this distraction. There is simply no good argument anymore for why this war was a benefit to anybody. Period. Let's move on.

** Corrected ** I don't know what I was thinking when I attributed the Turkmenbashi stuff to the Kyrgyz. I think I was stunned by the lack of vowels.