You know what REALLY gets me...

[wtmusic]

is all these clowns like Chuck Hagel who are so upset we're losing the war blah blah blah--would not give a rat's ass about killing 100K Iraqis if Americans weren't dying there. The only criteria of judging whether the war is good and just and the right thing to do--is whether Americans are dying there.

Now let's say our presence was 500,000 troops and we were kind of getting things under control, in the sense of blowing all resistance off the face of the earth. They would be howling to the moon about what a great decision it was, we're making great progress, etc.

Our success is measured in whether we get what we want, not whether the Iraqis get what they want. What better proof that we have no intention of giving them an ounce of self-determination.

I'm tired and pissed. End of story, end of rant. G'night.

[WhoWantsToBeOccupied]

1. We killed up to 200,000 in Gulf War 1

In the original Gulf War (which I supported strongly at the time, ignorant of the fact that our own government had armed Saddam throughout the 1980s, stood by when he used chemical weapons on his citizens and then reportedly encouraged him to invade Kuwait), we might have killed "only" 140,000 or as many as 200,000. I still recall a reporter asking a top military officer (Schwarzkopf?) to explain the unaccounted for 200,000 Iraqis. I was deeply troubled and conflicted by the moral calculus that says killing 200,000 Iraqis is justified if doing so saved just one or two American lives. We killed Iraqis as they were fleeing. We incinerated Iraqi conscripts who didn't even want to fight us. I recall that some American kid was found in the trenches. He had been visiting his grandmother in Iraq and was thrown into the trenches with the soldiers.