This year marks two decades since the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, a bloody conquest of a rogue state that more people should be honest about saying they “were for it before they were against it,” both on the left and right. It was peak Boomer: Bush and his conservative ultra-patriotic bullshit sending American millennials to die in battle against Middle Eastern millennials, Michael Moore and the insufferable latte libtards backseat driving with their simplistic everybody hold hands and sing bullshit, very nearly horseshoeing to outright sympathy for Islamic terrorists.

The attack on Iraq was a product of its time and the public’s raw bloodthirst, a year and a half after 9/11, with Afghanistan not being enough to sate it. Damn all the experts’ warnings that deposing Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party regime would cause a “power vacuum,” destabilizing the region and breaking it into a “quagmire,” a patchwork ruled by an unending series of warlords in constant conflict with each other and Americans caught in between with no “exit strategy” in sight.

This isn’t about Iraq though. This is about the Iraq that exists here in America: A rogue state sliding toward failed one we call the Republican Party. The parallels are eerie. Both Trump and Hussein were demented asshole dictators who nevertheless managed control over a vast geography populated by religious fanatics. Hussein’s two oldest sons were named Uday and Qusay. Trump’s two oldest sons were nicknamed Uday and Qusay. Both Trump and Hussein were deposed by pro-democracy coalitions of the willing. Their removals both came with bloodshed.

America itself is doing pretty alright since the Trump Regime’s collapse. Things could be better, of course, but who among those who voted to remove him actually regrets it? The rogue state however is almost in complete anarchy. The power vacuum left in Trump’s wake produced the chaos that took fucking 15 tries to get Kevin McCarthy elected as Speaker of The House. All these warlords fighting each other finally produces a nominal leader of a weakened rump state. If the Trump presidency was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq then the House GOP Majority of the 118th Congress and MAGA media are ISIS: A fanatic caliphate existing solely to wage holy war against a Western Civilization they deem fatally corrupt and decadent, democracy itself an affront to their suicidal creed.

The Mitch McConnell-Lindsey Graham GOP stands like Bashar Al-Asad’s Syria – an evil dictatorship still clinging to its diminished territory while the MAGA ISIS fights furiously to dislodge them. A cruel and poorly-governed rogue state that remains as an unfortunately necessary bulwark against the extremists who they were once in harmony with when they had their strongman.

The territorial warlords of the rogue state such as Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida wage their own wars against the infidels trapped within their kingdoms like the Taliban or Iran, and sowing chaos in the civilized world by cruelly shipping refugees. These warlords seek to covert the fanatics to their interpretation of the holy text in a bid for more power. They ruthlessly crush internal opposition – with DeSantis treating Disney World like Xi treats Hong Kong – and wreck the lives of their troops with pointless adventures – with Abbott sending Texas National Guard personnel to freeze and toil in misery like Vladimir Putin sends his troops to die in Ukraine.

Trajectory-wise Iraq and then ISIS over the last 20 years may be the closest analogue to the MAGA Republican Party over the last three. It’s really no cheeky exaggeration to say they inspire individual acts of terrorism like ISIS does. But the tip of their spear, the House GOP, is closest to petro-dictatorships like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela: With one hand on a key economic chokepoint for the United States. They can and almost certainly will squeeze when the time comes to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling, unilaterally imposing their own economic sanctions in retaliation for any and every grievance imaginable. They would sooner see the world burn than their power diminished. You saw it happen with your own eyes on January 6th, 2021.

You will see it again this year. MAGAmerica is our our ISIS. Our Iraq. Our Belarus. The North Korea right on our border. It is a failed, ungovernable rogue state led by a bloated, fatally weakened dictator who sells NFTs depicting himself as a superhero. They can be beaten. They have been.

But it’s not over. Dig in to finish the fight against the enemies of freedom.