The end of the war.

In Virginia, the "war", pronounced "the wah", refers to the War of Northern Aggression, known in our history books as The Civil War.
What is known in German as "Die Invasion", is called in French "Le debarquement", and in English D Day.
Liberation is in the eye of the beholder.
As I grew up in Lorraine, my childhood was full of tales of WWII. We even played war, dressed up in authentic GI fatigues, helmet liner included, waving a US flag that had gone through the actual Normandy landings. America, where some of my relatives had found a haven in the 1880's, was a mythical land, peopled with good guys, with unlimited power. Our TV screens were full of Hollywood productions. Our town was ringed with US air bases, defending us from a far from hypothetical Soviet invasion.

In 2004, the inhabitants of the Thionville area, regrouped in the Moselle River Association, gathered over 200 000 Euros to invite the US heroes who liberated them from the Nazis on November 11, 1944. The US veterans were feted, wined and dined and profusely thanked by a grateful population.

In August 2005, as Becky and I were visiting a D Day museum in Normandy, I heard a group of French high school students, expressing their surprise that the US were "the good guys"!

The damage caused by the ill fated war in Iraq goes beyond the 655,000 Iraqi dead, the 3,000 US soldiers lost, or even the billions of dollars wasted.
That war has destroyed the moral image of America, and worse, has tarnished its democratic values in the rest of the world.
To me, the removal of "the beacon of hope" that the US represented for the world at large, is the gravest failure committed by those who dragged the country in this adventure for sheer ideological, non-American reasons.
I trust that the Constitution will prove its worth and that the mid-term elections will allow us to rebuild this shattered image.