Remember 2003, when we just got going in Iraq?
When the count of U.S. Soldiers killed in the Iraq Occupation hit 150? We’re at 4370 now, not counting another 300 or so folks from the Coalition of the Increasingly Unwilling.
When only 1,500 civilians had died to date due to Bush’s non-existent post-war occupation planning? Today we’re at somewhere between 95,000 and 103,000 civilian deaths…and climbing.
Last month I argued against Obama’s emerging broke-ass Afghanistan policy. It looks like he is going forward with an escalation of 17,000 additional US soldiers. This, is in the face of our increasingly strangled and expensive supply lines.
And as I argued before, if we are dead set on an Afghanistan escalation (that we will eventually lose), we need to first complete the exit from Iraq. What could possibly go wrong? How about the existing tensions between the Kurds and Arabs in Northern Iraq flaring up into a full-on war? And it sure doesn’t help matters when our tactics involve the accidental, but continual slaughter of civilians from aerial bombardment - instead of winning hearts and minds, you need to pick them up from around the target.
Obama has been variously compared to JFK and Lincoln. Could we in fact be looking at the Reincarnation of LBJ?
Sad, really.
I’m sure the wrong-wing pundits are feeling good about themselves, knowing that U.S. troops just ‘liberated’ 14 more Iraqi civilians from Jay Garner’s undemocratic regime. The soldiers apparently took great care in protecting themselves against what the claim was gunfire from a nearby mosque:
“We used controlled, accurate fire,” said Capt. Roger K. Davvid, the company commander.
Apparently, the Captain and his soldiers decided not to fire back at the mosque (“out of respect for their religion) and chose to direct their hot lead at the folks speaking freely in front of them. Good thing too! Otherwise two “newly liberated” 10 year-old boys standing on the street nearby would surely have grown up to become terrorists!
I’d be interested to know the post-occupation liberation toll so far. There were 17 demonstrators back on 4/15/03 who were helped to discover freedom of speech by U.S. Marines:
“Today should be always remembered as a day where Iraqis expressed different opinions and weren’t shot for it.” – Ari Fleischer
