October is turning out to be one of the bloodiest months for U.S. troops since the war in Iraq began — their lives being expended so carelessly that even the generals on the ground are publicly re-thinking their latest pacification strategy in Baghdad. (One can only guess ho many Iraqis are dying in these operations. One can only guess because, as I mentioned last week, no one in an official capacity in the U.S. seems interested in counting them.) At the same time, we’re hearing more and more about how our leaders are “losing patience” with the Iraqi government, and there’s been some suggestion of a possible coup, martial law, etc. (see Saigon 1963). One can see a screw job in the making, for sure — a well-worn imperial gambit. Those damnable natives; they just can’t get it together! (See Saigon, pretty much any time between 1946 and 1975.) This whole Iraq thing was going great until they got in the game.

Once again I’m reminded of a comment I heard from a Canadian official a couple of years ago — something to the effect of, “When’s the last time you can recall the Americans taking responsibility for anything?” Well, it still rings true, particularly with regard to the perpetual explosion that is Iraq. Blame will be assigned to the Iraqi government, the Shi’ite militias, the Sunni insurgents, the Iranians, the Syrians, “foreign (i.e. not American) fighters,” Hezbollah, Hamas, Bill Clinton, Barbara Streisand — anybody but “me”. (That’s MBA backwards: Anybody But Me. Bush has got one of those, hasn’t he?) But no matter who is to “blame”, the game will remain the same — stay the course, get the job done, etc. That’s all Bush has now, and since he can’t run again, he’d just as soon not be one of those presidents who had to reverse their Custer decision and pull troops out from where he’d sent them, mission decidedly un-accomplished.

Correct me if I’m wrong (honest — there’s a comments form!) but I believe the mission now is to keep George W. Bush from looking bad… well, worse, let’s say. As long as we stay in Iraq, his political allies can ride around on their unicycles and tell all who will listen that Dubya is like Lincoln and Truman, taking political heat for an unpopular but necessary war, later to be vindicated by history and celebrated as strong and visionary leaders (Lincoln for saving the union; Truman for building the U.S. empire). If we leave Iraq now, that fiction evaporates. So 20, 22, 28, 35-year-old Americans are dying in combat to preserve Bush’s bogus claim to future greatness. That, at least, is what it looks like, since they appear to have no real plan behind what they’re doing. Just keep it going. Like Rumsfeld suggested last week, the War on Terror may never end. Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

If wishes were horses…

luv u,

jp

I didn’t hear much about the Johns Hopkins study of civilian deaths in Iraq before hearing people jeering at its conclusions as gross exaggerations and — in the tiny mind of our president — an incitement to further violence in the nation he has destroyed (sadly, with our help). Like most politicians, Bush likes some statistics and detests others, and nowadays the sound of a mere $250 billion federal budget deficit is so much sweeter than that of 655,000 dead Iraqi non-combatants. A grim tally indeed. One of the study’s authors, Les Roberts (recent candidate for the democratic nomination for congress in my hometown district), seems to me not at all the hysterical exaggerator type. A physician and epidemiologist, he has been working on public health issues for many years, including time in war zones like Bosnia. This study is a follow-up on the one his team released a couple of years ago that put the number of “excess deaths” (i.e. those resulting from the U.S. invasion) at that time conservatively at 100,000. (The administration hated that number too, as I recall. )

Of course, this is a statistic that was born to be an orphan, and I have little doubt that while it is excoriated by the Republicans, the Democrats will treat it like a leper, just as my hometown newspaper had done so far (no story as of yet). Bush’s reaction is understandable. Hey, what the hell — practically the only “good” news coming out of Iraq for Bush is the Saddam Hussein trial, so when someone claims that Dubya has killed more Iraqis than Saddam, this is not at all a good thing. And as the Democratic leadership knows, he’s not the only one on the hook. There’s enough blood here to stain us all, and that always makes politicians uncomfortable. Don’t want to be giving people the impression that they are, well, responsible for anything their democratically elected leaders do, now do we? That’s no way to get votes. Just give the people happy talk about how we’re the greatest country in the world, and how we’ve never done anything wrong to anybody… and by the way, there’s that evil menace out there. Oh yeah… and you can have war and tax cuts at the same time.

Whatever the pols would have you believe, if this new Iraq casualties study is anything close to true, this is truly one of the major bloodlettings of our time — Rwanda league, for sure. But even if it were closer to the lower figures I hear the administration bandying about — a mere 50,000 or 100,000 — isn’t that bad enough? Isn’t the real crime that those deaths are so unimportant, regardless of their magnitude? For chrissake, does anybody still think that this war was unavoidable? If we’re close to unanimity on that, isn’t it time we consider the degree to which we are responsible for the suffering in Iraq? Is it somehow less disturbing to imagine a 2:1 ratio of Saddam’s killings to our own than something closer to 1:1, when we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of bodies in either case? Shouldn’t totals like this bother us at least as much as some lame-ass Congressman pulling a boner on teen pages?

Democracy = responsibility. That’s why we need to speak up, act up, and vote to end this stupid war.

luv u,

jp