Kermit Swanson’s Your View, published Aug. 7, contends that Bush was right all along about the war in Iraq and the Bush bashers were wrong. So exactly how is it that the American people are better off because Bush decided to invade Iraq? The war to date has cost more than 4,000 American dead and 72,000 wounded, thousands of them disabled or disfigured for life, and $3 trillion that won’t go to health care, education, or alternative energy development.

If Bush was right, then where are the WMD, and why did the Bush administration need a blizzard of lies to justify the invasion, including forged documents claiming that Saddam was cooperating with al Qaeda?

Saddam is gone, but so is the counterweight to Iran, leaving Teheran with a growing sphere of influence in Iraq. The Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan because of the premature withdrawal of U.S. forces, pulled out to prepare for the Iraq invasion.

Bin Laden is still at large seven years later. No, he wasn’t hiding in Iraq.

Pakistan, a nuclear state, is teetering on the edge because of Taliban-influenced radicalism, and has abandoned the U.S. war on terror.

Bush’s legacy is a trumped up invasion of Iraq, failing policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and damaged U.S. prestige because of Abu Ghraib and torture. The beneficiaries of his policies have been Iran and Islamic fundamentalism, not America.

As a RAND corporation study recently concluded: “There is no battlefield solution to terrorism. Military force usually has the opposite effect from what is intended.” They could have added, especially when you invade under false pretenses. George Bush and John McCain still haven’t figured it out.