Donald Rumsfeld insists that Iraq is not another Vietnam. And he’s right… it’s much worse. It took four years to rack up 397 active duty deaths in ‘Nam. Bush has done it in just seven months. In 1965, combat troop levels stood at 130,000, the same number on the ground in Iraq today. So the comparisons, unlike this Presidency, are legitimate. While students are yet to be gunned down at Kent State, Americans are beginning to sour on the war. Polls show that George Bush’s popularity is dwindling rapidly and when an Italian Provisional Authority official resigned after 19 of his countrymen were blown to smithereens, the President, shaken and distraught, fled to London.

Buckingham Palace, sadly, provided no refuge: During his first night, W. was repeatedly taken as one of Paul Burrell’s male prostitutes. The next morning he awoke amid the greatest security scandal in the history of the empire when news broke that a Daily Mirror reporter had infiltrated the royal staff. Ryan Parry said palace security was so lax that his bags were rarely checked and that he had been shown “the secret hiding places for keys” which gave him “access to every member of the royal family.” In a 15 page exposé which hit newsstands as the President was soiling his ER-II bathmats, Parry wrote, “ Had I been a terrorist intent on assassinating the queen or American President George Bush, I could have done so with absolute ease.” The president’s downward spiral continued when tens of thousands of anti-American protesters filled the streets and reports filtered in from Istanbul where twin bombings against British targets killed more than two dozen people, including Consul-General Roger Short. During a joint appearance with Tony Blair who vowed not to retreat “one inch” from terrorism, Bush pointed at the Prime Minister and said of the war, “It was all his idea.”

Actually, according to Newsweek’s cover story, it was all Dick Cheney’s idea. It was Cheney, apparently, who exaggerated Saddam’s nuclear capability and embellished sketchy reports linking Muhammad Atta to Iraqi Intelligence. It was Cheney who promoted international fugitive Ahmad Chalabi as some kind of Iraqi George Washington. Well, now the pressure is on and if the Vice President wants to remain part of the Republican ticket, he needs to come up with some Weapons of Mass Destruction, and soon. This explains recent special ops forays into the Bekka Valley and Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Yet the question begs: Why would the Vice President be so hell-bent on orchestrating a regime change?

Perhaps that $4 billion asbestos settlement is still stuck in his craw. In an effort to make amends, the administration handed juicy no-bid reconstruction contracts to Halliburton. With this largesse in hand, Dick Cheney’s oil company reported a third quarter profit of $58 million. Halliburton’s latest results were indeed goosed by government payments for work in Iraq, including a hefty bonus for price gouging imported gasoline. The Army Corps of Engineers is paying Halliburton $2.65 a gallon for the same Kuwaiti petrol that the Iraqis bring in for 97 cents. And if that weren’t enough, the nitwits at the Pentagon are only charging 15 cents at the pump. Well, you can imagine where our $87 billion dollars is going. Certainly not for high-powered military equipment as the third helicopter in as many weeks was brought down by a street gang armed with nothing but rocks and a book of matches. We seem to lose personnel daily and things have gotten so bad that some politicians want to pull out the Army and redeploy the Marines.

They might be better served by sending over a platoon of lawyers. Where Halliburton reamed the U.S. Army, a Houston litigator made the firm his bitch, taking $70 million out of corporate coffers during a contract dispute. And what soldier measures up to Gerry Curry, an attorney who sustained six shots at point blank range outside a Los Angeles courthouse? Despite being struck in the neck and upper body, Curry walked away from the scene and even managed to bill his assailant for half an hour’s work. Let the Iraqis try to deal with that.