Heck of a job, Georgie!

Anthony Arnove is the author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal (American Empire Project, Metropolitan) and, with Howard Zinn, of Voices of the People's History of the United States (Seven Stories).

Here is a short rundown of some of what Bush's war and occupation has wrought.

Nowhere on Earth is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, some 2 million Iraqis have fled their country and are now scattered across everywhere from Jordan, Syria, Turkey and Iran to London and Paris. (Almost none have made it to the United States, which has done nothing to address the refugee crisis it created.) Another 1.9 million are estimated to be internally displaced persons, driven from their homes and neighborhoods by the US occupation and the vicious civil war it has sparked. Add those figures up - and they're getting worse by the day - and you have close to 16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead to the displaced, and that figure rises to nearly one in five Iraqis. Let that sink in for a moment.

Basic foods and necessities, which even Saddam Hussein's brutal regime managed to provide, are now increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary Iraqis, thanks to soaring inflation unleashed by the occupation's destruction of the already shaky Iraqi economy, cuts to state subsidies encouraged by the International Monetary Fund and the Coalition Provisional Authority, and the disruption of the oil industry.

Prices of vegetables, eggs, tea, cooking and heating oil, gasoline and electricity have skyrocketed. Unemployment is regularly estimated at somewhere between 50% and 70%. One measure of the impact of all this has been a significant rise in child malnutrition, registered by the United Nations and other organizations. Not surprisingly, access to safe water and regular electricity remain well below pre-invasion levels, which were already disastrous after more than a decade of comprehensive sanctions against, and periodic bombing of, a country staggered by a catastrophic war with Iran in the 1980s and the first Gulf War.
In an ongoing crisis, in which hundred of thousands of Iraqis have already died, the past few months have proved some of the bloodiest on record. In October alone, more than 6,000 civilians were killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad, where thousands of additional US troops had been sent in August (in the first official "surge") with the claim that they would restore order and stability in the city.