The dying continues in Iraq while at home we bury our heads in the sand

[babylonsister]

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17364140.htm

The dying continues in Iraq while at home we bury our heads in the sand
By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
McClatchy Newspapers

The war in Iraq grinds on without much regard for an American president's pipedreams of victory, a congressional majority's impotent attempts to stop it and most of the American people's wish that it would just go away.

We're now well into the fifth year of this war. All 30,000 of President Bush's surge reinforcements are on the ground, and we have more than 150,000 American soldiers and Marines in the cauldron. The only surge in sight is an inevitable surge in the numbers of those troops being killed and wounded.

More than 3,500 Americans have now been killed in action and more than 29,000 wounded, along with an additional 25,000-plus injured in accidents. That's close to 60,000 American casualties to date, and God alone knows how many Iraqis have been killed and wounded in the war and the civil war - certainly hundreds of thousands.

The central focus of George W. Bush's escalation was to make Baghdad more secure so that the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki could take control of its own capital. In truth, Baghdad seems no more secure now than it was - only a more target-rich environment - and even the president and his generals predict that things will get worse before they get better. If they get better.

A beleaguered president must travel to Albania, of all places, to find a little love. Will he now, as Richard Nixon before him, become an inveterate lame-duck globetrotter in search of a crowd that will cheer him? What's next? Kazakhstan? Tierra del Fuego? How about Baghdad?

The Army and Marines scrape and scratch and scheme and pay big bucks and beguile high school dropouts, even those with criminal records, in their efforts to recruit enough young men and women to replace the casualties and those who are leaving the service.

The administration doesn't want you to worry about any of this. It's summertime, shopping time, surf's up. Head for the beach and bury your heads in the sand.

more...

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

I could rant but well...

[TomClash]

2. Hey, who cares? The economy is great, isn't it?

Yeah, if you run a hedge fund.

[tblue]

4. And The Sopranos has ended. Whoa is me. What will we watch on TV?

[MadMaddie]

3. Watching the News in Seattle....

They just ran through a list of soldiers killed just recently from our area...

The military base is being overwhelmed with the almost daily soldier deaths...so they are contemplating having one mass service at the end of the month versus individual services.....

The death rate from our area is increasing rapidly...