The war in Iraq has now cost more than 3,000 American lives, caused more than 20,000 injuries, thousands of them permanent. At least 41,600 civilians and others in the combat zones have been killed, according to the nonpartisan estimates of Iraq Body Count, which keeps detailed data on all deaths in Iraq.

To continue to instill fear into Americans, the Bush–Cheney Administration has used the fifth year anniversary of 9/11 to tout the $20 billion spent on airport security, but hasn’t acknowledged the vulnerability of the nation’s ports, railway or bus systems. While praising the new multimillion dollar counterterrorism building and all the agencies working within it, it hasn’t acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security has become a bungling bureaucratic nightmare. And, underneath all of the blustering and braggadocio is still a domestic reality—health care, the environment, and protection of all Americans against workforce exploitation and poverty is of secondary importance to this Administration.

Two days after his election in 2004, George W. Bush told America he “earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” He said, “That’s what happened in the—after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election—and I’m going to spend it.”

For several months after 9/11, Americans were united in their grief. Almost the entire world, including countries with a majority of its population Muslim, was America’s ally. President Bush and his war cabinet squandered that good will by their arrogant jingoistic deceitfulness and stupidity, and are now on a nationwide tour to invoke the memory of 9/11 and try to hammer-lock the nation into believing that they needed to give up some Constitutional and fundamental rights in order to be safe. The President has spent all of his political capital and has put America into debt.

America is divided, more so than during the Vietnam War. The Bush–Cheney legacy won’t be that they stopped terrorism, but that they played upon fear to promote a political agenda that fractured a country almost as much as the Civil War ever did.