For the past three years, the world has watched as the situation in Iraq has gotten progressively worse. In March 2003, the United States invaded the country and quickly defeated the national armies. In May, President Bush, in one of his more asinine acts of public relations, "landed" a fighter plane on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declared, behind a patriotic banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" and the U.S. had won the war.

Or did the U.S. win the war? Note President Bush's choice of language: "major combat operations [...] have ended." This statement implies that "minor combat operations" may still be going on and begs the question, "What are 'major' and 'minor' combat operations?" As it turns out, taking over the country was a "major" combat operation. Subduing the populce was a "minor" combat operation.

But things got worse. L. Paul Bremer, III, headed up a body known as the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose job it was to rebuild the country and prepare it for self-rule. This included supervising the creation of a constitution and the holding of national elections.

But the Coalition Provisional Authority was never really in charge. Saddam Hussein had ruled the country for twenty-odd years and made it a policy to destroy any person or institution that threatened his power. The notion that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda had any kind of operating relationship was ludicrous to people who paid attention, as Saddam was egomaniacal enough that he would never share power with anyone, even a group whose objectives were similar to his own. In the absence of a strong dictator and military police, the country went into chaos.

Iraq, like the rest of the Muslim world, is a majority Sunni country with a Shi'a minority concentrated in the middle and a Kurdish minority in the north. Like most former colonies, Iraq's borders were drawn by Europeans who either didn't know or didn't care about ethnic differences. They drew lines with rulers back in the comfort of England, fashioning a nation without regard to the rules of nation-building. Nations must be constructed among people who have similar religions, traditions, cultures, and, yes, ethnic backgrounds. Ethnic hatred has been popular in the world ever since the beginning of civilization, and nations would not have naturally formed among enemies. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happened in Iraq. The Kurds -- who are Sunni -- nevertheless belong to a different ethnic group than ethnic Iraqi Sunnis. And Shiite Iraqis are ethnically Iraqi, but have a different take on Islam from the Iraqi Sunnis. The Sunni/Shi'a divide is practically as old as Islam itself, and Saddam Hussein spared no expense in tormenting the country's Shi'a minority. It certainly doesn't help that Iran, Iraq's bitter enemy, is the only majority Shiite country in the world.

So, once Saddam was gone, Sunni militants began to appear in Shiite areas, and vice-versa. It appeared as though a group of civilian militants were trying to seize power in the resulting vacuum, using bombs as their currency. The rest of 2003 was spent fighting this insurgency, most notably in Fallujah, where several U.S. defense contractors were killed and their charred corpses paraded through the streets. It also appeared as though militants were infiltrating the ranks of Iraqi police, enforcing the law by day and blowing people up by night.

By 2004, however, it became clear that it wasn't just Iraqis themselves who were responsible for this violence. A group called al-Qaeda in Iraq, formerly headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, claimed to be bringing the anti-American, anti-Israeli platform of al-Qaeda to Iraq in the form of kidnappings, beheadings, and roadside bombs. Now, outside groups were coming into Iraq to take advantage of the weak government and lack of control in order to make Iraq a staging ground for their U.S. hatred and even to use Iraq as a terrorist training ground.

Through all of this, though, President Bush remained firm in his insistence that (1) the news media were merely reporting all the bad events and none of the good events and (2) that the world was a safer place with Saddam Hussein out of power. While it would be hard to disprove the first assertion, the second assertion can be disproven. In April, 2006, the U.S. State Department reported that worldwide terrorist attacks increased in 2005. A National Intelligence Estimate leaked in September indicated that the Iraq War had actually made the worldwide terrorism problem worse and had become a "cause celebre" for terrorists.

And that brings me to the crux of this article. For the past three years, President Bush has essentially told us the following things:

1. Iraq is doing just fine and the news reports you hear about it are blown wildly out of proportion.
2. The Iraqi people are glad that Saddam Hussein is out of power.
3. We went into Iraq to stop Saddam from using weapons of mass destruction.
4. We went into Iraq to stop Saddam from developing nuclear weapons.
5. We went into Iraq because Saddam was in violation of UN resolution 1441.
6. We went into Iraq because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

I will address these in turn.

1. Iraq is doing just fine

Iraq is not doing just fine. The report of the Iraq Study Group, released last week, concludes that our current strategy in Iraq is not working and things in Iraq are only getting worse. These are the conclusions of a bi-partisan panel co-chaired by James Baker, III, formerly Secretary of State for President George H.W. Bush. This is not The New York Times or CNN saying this. Furthermore, much of Iraq is still without infastructure, including water and power, and there is little economy to speak of. November was the worst month yet for terrorist attacks, which seem only to be getting worse. Nothing is going well in Iraq. It's not that news outlets over-report the bad news; it's that there is no good news coming out of Iraq to report!

2. The Iraqi people are glad that Saddam Hussein is out of power

In 2005, ABC News conducted a poll in Iraq that concluded that Iraqis were more optimistic about the future than they were in 2004. However, only 46 percent believe the country was better off than it was before the war, and two-thirds opposed the presence of U.S. forces in Iraq. A majority of Iraqis believes that things worse now than before Saddam Hussein.

3. We went for WMDs

This assertion was refuted long ago by David Kay, the U.N. weapons inspector who was prematurely removed from Iraq by the United States, the latter later claiming that it was Saddam who had removed the weapons inspectors "before the job [was] done." In 2004, The Kay Report concluded that "we were all wrong" about there being weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There is compelling evidence to believe that the Bush administration knew this, but ignored intelligence that said so, preferring to give credence to intelligence that bolstered its position that Iraq did have WMDs.

4. We went for nuclear weapons

Many U.N. officials and Iraqi defectors have all said the same thing: Saddam abandoned his nuclear program in the mid-1990s, just like he said he did. Even though Bush claimed that "Iraq sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," this turned out to be a lie, based on intelligence from a source who was known to be liar.

5. We went in for the UN resolution

At the time that the United States invaded Iraq, some ninety other U.N. resolutions were being violated by other countries.

6. We went in because Iraq and al-Qaeda were in cahoots

The September 11 Commission found in 2004 that there was no "significant operating relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And while President Bush publicly declared that, yes, there was no relationship between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, he continued to repeat the equation "Iraq = al-Qaeda." Intelligence which claimed to show that Iraqi officials met with al-Qaeda officials has since been discredited, and was in fact known to be uncredible at the time.

And now, here we are, with the findings of the Iraq Study Group. The group was convened in March of this year, so it's only a coincidence that the report comes on the heels of a spectacular loss for the Republican party. The past month has been a strange one, with President Bush sounding the most conciliatory he ever has, since he knows that he can no longer get away with lying to a rubber-stamp Congress run by his own party.

Nevertheless, he has continued to mouth catchphrases like "We will not leave before the job is done." He never defines what the "job" is, or what "done" means, but continues to make these statements as though they are a package containing their own self-evident hypotheses, evidence, and conclusions.

But the Iraq Study Group is not the only government body to officially recognize that President Bush's tactics aren't working. Robert Gates, the soon-to-be Secretary of Defense, answered with a blunt "No, sir" when asked at his confirmation hearings if the situation in Iraq was going well. This is the first time we have ever heard a current member of the administration saying, in public and on the record, that the situation in Iraq is not what the president says it is.

Could it be that the president is ... mistaken? For three years, we have been lied to and watched as President Bush talks at us with his self-satisfied smirk about how things in Iraq are dandy, about how people who suggest otherwise are trying to play partisan political games, and how we mustn't give in to any thought of leaving before the undefined "job" is "done" without any parameters specifying when we will be "done."

But the Iraq Study Group has suggested that we have pretty much three options: (1) increase troop levels, (2) take the troops out and leave, or (3) take most of the troops out, leaving some behind not as police or occupiers but as "advisors." Bush, through Press Secretary Tony Snow, has said that it will be next year before we have a response to the Iraq Study Group findings. It takes more than a week, you see, to clean three years' worth of gunk out of the president's brain so that he can make his first-ever informed statement.

And this makes me wonder whether or not Bush is blissfully ignorant or intentionally ignorant. On the one hand, it could be that Bush is the nation's biggest idiot. It may be very well that he actually believes that the situation in Iraq is going swimmingly and that the only thing separating Iraq now from the utopian vision of Iraq in Bush's mind is more time and a little more faith from the American people. This is entirely plausible, since Bush surrounds himself with yes-men and doesn't tolerate dissention in his ranks. If someone in the administration disagrees with Bush, it's not that Bush is wrong, it's that the disagreer is wrong and must be banished from his sight. We've seen this with Colin Powell, Richard Clarke, and Paul O'Neill, among others.

But there is an equally good chance that President Bush is no fool and knows full well that the situation in Iraq "is grave and deteriorating." Yet, he keeps an optimistic attitude because, as a leader, he cannot let us see that he is just as pessimistic as we are about Iraq. If that were true, then there would be no hope for the future. Unfortunately, thousands of Iraqi civilians and American soldiers have died so that Bush may save face. The longer he insists that things are great, the longer we stay there, and the more American soldiers die for a cause that is emphatically not worth dying for.

Somehow, even though his agenda is clearly defeated, he still manages that self-satisfying smirk. He used it earlier this week when he talked about suggestions that he would reject, one of them being "leaving before the job is done." Like a self-appointed expert who knows that he doesn't know what he's talking about, Bush repeats the same things again and again, hoping beyond hope that the act of repeating them will make them true.

And now we wait while Bush's strategists try to come up with a response to the Iraq Study Group's report that will save face by making it appear that Bush is implementing policy changes not because he was goaded into it but because he has suddenly realized, of his own volition, that it was time for those policy changes. This is the reason for a month-long waiting period: to get the report out of the short-term memory of the American people so that when the policy changes do appear, no one will remember that they were actually someone else's recommendations.

Watching the president on TV, I'm astonished that, somehow, this man is our leader. I'm further astonished that, after the incompetence he demonstrated in his first term, he was re-elected. What does that say about the incompetence of America? Thankfully, this year's referendum on his performance said, in no uncertain terms, that we don't approve of what's going on. President Bush will live on in history as the most corrupt, asinine, incompentent, childish, immature, undeserving, stupid, and smarmy president in history. You can tell watching him that he was president of his fraternity; he acts every part the stereotypical frat-boy, a person who is intellectually not curious, doesn't care about the world around him, and is looking out only for himself and his cadre of buddies. He refuses to accept responsibility for the things he has done wrong and he even refuses to admit that he was wrong. It took even Augusto Pinochet thirty years to claim responsibility for his actions, and that was only on his deathbed. Must we wait until at least 2036 before Bush finally admits that invading Iraq was his fault and that it was a mistake? These eight years may well be regarded as a time when the world lived on a razor's edge between cynicism and out-and-out despair. There is only one man in the entire world who can be blamed, and everyone but him knows that it's his fault.