As The Dead Americans Pile Up In Iraq, Bush Plunges Ahead Indifferently

by Steve Soto

While we have all read the embedded stories from reporters about how smashingly our forces did in routing the insurgents from Fallujah over the last ten days, it takes a great piece of journalism from the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins to bring the folly of war itself all home to you. Against the inane backdrop of our senior commanders in the area saying that the Fallujah campaign had “broken the back” of the insurgency, and Bush’s hollow threats today aimed at Iran over its nuclear program, one can see the real problem with what we are doing in Iraq. We are sending good, very young men like 22 year-old William Miller, Lonny Wells, Nick Ziolkowski, and 21 year-old Romulo Jimenez II to their deaths, and for what?

At a time when the Iraqi child malnutrition rate since the occupation has doubled, violence in Iraq accelerates after our “liberation” of Fallujah, rather than decreases, because any good we did by sacrificing these fine young men to take Fallujah was undone the next day when our stooge Allawi ordered our forces to attack a Baghdad mosque, killing worshippers. As a result, today saw the worst outbreak of bombings in Iraq in weeks, and not surprisingly the Pentagon is now announcing that they will need thousands more troops to deal with insurgents than previously reported. Conveniently this comes after our election.

So what hope do we have that there won’t be a thousand more fine young Americans killed in the coming months? Very little. Mr. Bush told foreign leaders today that he wants to do a better job in his second term in building alliances, as long as everyone else still does it his way. And his empty threats against Iran, coupled with a second term Cabinet of narrow-minded, overly loyal inside-the-box hacks who are a prime candidate for a groupthink catastrophe, only ensures that more Americans will die here and overseas due to Bush’s mistakes in judgment and his character flaws.