http://www.niagarafallsreporter.com/gallagher332.htmlTHE BLOOD ON GEORGE BUSH'S HANDS
By Bill Gallagher
snip//
Bush and his supporters always ignore or play down the bloody cost of this brutal war for the Iraqi people. Their suffering is an afterthought. "We don't do body counts," Gen. Tommy "The Jerk" Franks famously said after he conquered Baghdad and went home to smoke cigars and play golf.
But others are counting, and the numbers are staggering. A British polling organization now pegs Iraqi civilian deaths in more than four years of war at 1.2 million people. The ORB poll surveyed Iraqi adults and determined nearly one in two households in Baghdad had lost at least one family member to war-related violence, and nationwide 22 percent of the households had suffered at least one death. Do we really expect "political stability" when people are enduring such promiscuous violence?
Last year, when the British medical journal "Lancet" put the number of Iraqi deaths at 654,965, Iraqi officials called the count "ridiculous" and Bush dismissed the number as "not credible" without challenging the methodology of the scientists who prepared the survey for the reputable publication.
In his speech, Bush made no mention of the more than 2.5 million Iraqi refugees who have fled their homes. That number continues to grow, especially among professionals and the more educated. Bush never mentions his war has virtually eradicated the Christian population in Iraq, a faith community rooted there two thousand years ago.
snip//
The truth is we are not safer in any measurable way, spending $3 billion a week, wasting countless lives in a monumental historic debacle. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote, "Iraq is, was and forever will be our very own massive strategic blunder, a failed land grab for position and power in a tinderbox region defined by furious instability and corruption and death. ... Iraq has always been a war between our dueling national identities, a battle over how we are to move and breathe and behave in the new millennium. Are we really this violently paranoid bully, this rogue pre-emptive screw-em-all ideological war machine defined by the dystopian Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld vision of permanent, ongoing global conflict?"
Or are we something better: a nation committed to peace, willing to change the failed strategy in Iraq by ending the war that should never have been started in the first place.