2001 American Soldiers Have Died in Iraq

The Iraq Coalition Casualty Count (http://icasualties.org/oif) reports that as of yesterday 2001 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. The AntiWar.com site (http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/) gives the following additional statistics: “As many as 1 of every 10 soldiers from the war on terror evacuated to the Army's biggest hospital in Europe was sent there for mental problems. Between 8 and 10 percent of nearly 12,000 soldiers from the war on terror, mostly from Iraq, treated at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany had 'psychiatric or behavioral health issues,' according to the commander of the hospital, Col. Rhonda Cornum. That means about 1,000 soldiers were evacuated for mental problems. The hospital has treated 11,754 soldiers from the war on terror, with 9,651 from Iraq and the rest from Afghanistan, according to data released by the hospital.” The neocons are saying that the people who are against the war planned “parties” to celebrate the 2000th American soldier death. Have they no shame? As far as I can tell, it’s the people who are trying to stop the slaughter and get our soldiers home who are supporting and honoring our troops, not the neocon liars who started this unnecessary war and want to prolong it until the year 2015. This morning’s NYT repeats that the Iraq Body Count group (http://www.iraqbodycount.net/database/) estimates between 26,000 to 30,000 Iraq civilians have been killed in this war. But I’ll put my faith in a Washington Post independent survey that reported at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians have needlessly died in the Bush administration’s needless war. It was mever a war to liberate the Middle East from despotic dictators. From the beginning, the war in Iraq was promoted by the White House Iraq Group to show that the US is so powerful it can aggress on any nation anywhere and blow it to smithereens. Well, we surely showed the world, didn’t we? Right now, today, if a tiny rogue nation detonated a homemade nuclear bomb or a germ warfare device in the US, we could not defend ourselves. We have no military. And worse yet, we have no plan for how the US would defend itself. Oh yes, we have a virtual military conjured up in the fantasy world of insane men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. And in this fantasy world the US would deploy phantom troops who would miraculously counterattack the chemicals or render a nuclear device inoperative ala Superman or Batman. But we have no actual well-equipped, well-trained fighting force or an actual workable plan for defending ourselves either here or in any part of the world. Indictments may or may not be handed down today by the Fitzgerald grand jury. But in any case the Bush administration has effectively finished itself off by malfeasance and misconduct. We can only hope the United States hasn’t also been rendered useless and impotent by these Republican mad hatters. They hijacked our legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and now they have pissed on themselves, our Constitution and 229 years of democracy.