A Sad Milestone

Fubar, posting at Needlenose, notes that US combat deaths in Iraq now number more than a thousand. For context, he notes that the thousandth combat death in Vietnam didn't occur until our eighth year of involvement.

Timshel and Ian McGibboney both write about local soldiers killed in recent fighting. In Ian's case, one young man was apparently an acquaintance and classmate.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the families--but I'm also quite angry at the people who put these young men in harm's way for NO REASON. Listening to the GOP speak glowingly about the Iraq war--while having the nerve to wear Purple Heart band-aids--is a horrible insult to our soldiers. The young men and women who are fighting and dying in Iraq deserve better than such crass cynicism.

Whether the wingnuts like to admit it or not, the war in Iraq was pushed upon us on by a pack of lies. Anyone questioning this need only go back and look at the record. Thanks to the "Find" function of Internet Exploder, I was able to find twenty six references to "weapons" in Bush's final press conference prior to the invasion--but not a SINGLE instance of him referring to human rights (to be fair, there are roughly ten or so references to the "Iraqi people," but only two that specifically refer to their suffering under the Hussein regime). The war was sold on the THREAT posed by Saddam Hussein, namely, his cache of WMD that he was allegedly ready to hurl at us. Which was a lie, pure and simple.

Now over a thousand young men and women are dead as a result. Add to this the "non-combat" fatalities, and the horrific injuries that modern weaponry is capable of causing, and you have a monster sized mess that can't be cleaned up anytime soon.

And don't forget the thousands of Iraqis killed--forever nameless and faceless in our media, even though they too have sons, daughters, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, and friends...

Before too long, there will be two thousand US combat deaths--then three thousand, and perhaps even more. Who knows how many Iraqis will be killed before it's all over--which will happen when, like the French in Algeria, like the French and the US in Vietnam, like the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and like the Israelis in Lebanon (to name four instances) we pull out of a country we've devasted in the name of "freedom."

What a waste...