Edifying fables from the Big Book of Alternate History
By 
This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war. Lets review what happened to the principal architects of an immense war crime that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people, and leaving a broken shell of a country wracked by a years-long particularly vicious civil war.
George W. Bush
Sentenced to 20 years in prison by the International Criminal Court at the Hague. Here he is commenting on the striking parallels between himself and Vladimir Putin:
Funny stuff!
Dick Cheney
Died in prison in 2008 when his mechanical pseudo-heart could no longer be successfully serviced.
Donald Rumsfeld
Released in 2018 after serving a 14-year prison term. Lived in a Benedictine monastery until his death two years ago.
Condi Rice
After her six year prison term, Rice became homeless, and died of exposure on a New York city sidewalk, where she had been begging for spare change from passersby.
Colin Powell
Fled to the Bahamas, which refused to extradite him for his trial at ICC. Was sentenced to 25 years in abstentia. Died by drowning when he attempted to drive to the Jersey shore to see a Doors cover band.
John Bolton
Pecked to death by rabid crows.
Jeffery Goldberg
Fired from his job as a staff writer at the New Yorker, after he published a #slatepitch that became one of the more influential arguments for the war before it was launched (It was entered into the Congressional Record by Joe Lieberman). Current whereabouts unknown.
. . . excuse me Chet, we’re getting an update right now:
In 2007, he was hired by David G. Bradley to write for The Atlantic. Bradley had tried for nearly two years to convince Goldberg to work for The Atlantic, and was finally successful after renting ponies for Goldberg’s children.
He couldn’t find that pony in Iraq, so somebody had to rent it for him.
Thanks folks, I’ll be here all week, unlike all those hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis.
The reality is that most of the D.C. foreign policy blob signed up to push the Iraq War, and for the most part, they’re all still there, several big steps up the career ladder, just blobbing away. Voltaire said that humanity invented hell to dissuade people from doing wrong when they noticed there didn’t seem to be any consequences for it here on Earth. On this bleak anniversary, you can certainly understand where he was coming from.