Bloody chaos was required

After quoting from Dahr Jamail writing about the dozens of dead brought daily to Baghdad hospitals and morgues, Chris Floyd comments:

Day after day this horror goes on, this madness that we have created. Our presence there unleashed it; our removal will not stop it. In his madness, his hubris and his putrid criminality, Bush has engineered a nightmare from which there is no escape, for which there is no good solution, no outcome at all that won't produce more mass death and unbearable suffering.

Of course, Dick Cheney has no regrets.

Asked whether in his "darkest nights" he ever doubted the decision to go to war, he said: "I think what we've done has been what needed to be done."

Mr Cheney was unmoved by postwar disclosures about the use of hyped and faulty intelligence to make the case for the invasion - some of which has been tied directly to his office.

He said: "In the end, you can argue about the quality of the intelligence and so forth, but ... I look at that whole spectrum of possibilities and options, and I think we did the right thing."