Feel safer? I don't. I was already feeling morose about my older son turning 20 tomorrow in Afghanistan, then I read this from
Reuters:
Baghdad - Five U.S. soldiers were killed when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle while on patrol in Baghdad on Thursday, the U.S. military said.
Another two American soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb near the southern Iraqi city of Najaf, Iraqi police said.
Of course, it could be worse...read on about "why they hate us."
Look at the Iraqi deaths from just today:
Jan 5 (Reuters) - Following are security incidents in Iraq reported on Thursday, Jan. 5, as of 1400 GMT.
U.S. and Iraqi forces are battling a Sunni Arab insurgency against the Shi'ite and Kurdish-led government in Baghdad.
*Asterisk denotes a new or updated item.
BAQUBA - Gunmen ambushed a convoy carrying Lieutenant- Colonel Adel Abdul Karem, head of criminal intelligence in Diyala province, 65 km (40 miles) east of Baghdad, seriously wounding him and killing three of his bodyguards. Police said he had been on his way to his office in Baquba.
*KERBALA - At least 50 people were killed and 69 wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near the shrine of Imam Hussein in the Shi'ite holy city of Kerbala 110 km (68 miles) south of Baghdad, police said.
*BAGHDAD - Three car bombs, two of them suicide attacks, exploded in central Baghdad on Thursday, killing two people and wounding six, according to police and Interior Ministry sources.
*RAMADI - A suicide bomb attack in the city of Ramadi killed more than 70 and wounded 65, said Mahmoud al-Dulaimi, a doctor at Ramadi's main hospital.
The update on the mosque bombing now says that 99 people were killed.
NOW, close your eyes and imagine that you couldn't go worship or go visit a hospital or go to the market (which you must do daily, since with only FOUR hours of electricity daily, you cannot keep perishable foods for long) or even just sit in your own home without having to worry about you, your spouse, your children, your parents, your siblings, your friends being blown to bits.
Wouldn't you long for the days when you had a "normal" life under a totalitarian dictator? Wait a minute, don't all of us here just about live that life right now, with the lawless Bush Administration doing whatever the Hell suits them, with NO check on their power from the political hacks in Congress or the jurisdiction deprived federal judiciary?
Tom Englehardt wrote a great piece today called Deified Caesar. Here's a snippet:
...For these cultists of an all-powerful presidency, the holy war, the "crusade" to be embarked upon was, above all, aimed at creating a President accountable to no one, overseen by no one, and restricted by no other force or power in his will to act as he saw fit. And so, in this White House, all roads have led back to one issue: How to press ever harder at the weakening boundaries of presidential power. This is why, when critics concentrate on any specific issue or set of administration acts, no matter how egregious or significant, they invariably miss the point. The issue, it turns out, is never primarily - to take just two areas of potentially illegal administration activity - torture or warrantless surveillance. Though each of them had value and importance to top administration officials, they were nonetheless primarily the means to an end.
This is why the announcement of (and definition of) the "global war on terror" almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks was so important. It was to be a "war" without end. No one ever attempted to define what "victory" might actually consist of, though we were assured that the war itself would, like the Cold War, last generations. Even the recent sudden presidential announcement that we will now settle only for "complete victory" in Iraq is, in this context, a distinctly limited goal because Iraq has already been defined as but a single "theater" (though a "central" one) in a larger war on terror. A war without end, of course, left the President as a commander-in-chief-without-end and it was in such a guise that the acolytes of that "obscure philosophy" of total presidential power planned to claim their "inherent" constitutional right to do essentially anything. (Imagine what might have happened if their invasion of Iraq had been a success!)
Having established their global war on terror, and so their "war powers," in the fall of 2001, top administration officials then moved remarkably quickly to the outer limits of power - by plunging into the issue of torture. After all, if you can establish a presidential right to order torture (no matter how you manage to redefine it) as well as to hold captives under a category of warfare dredged up from the legal dustbin of history in prisons especially established to be beyond the reach of the law or the oversight of anyone but those under your command, you've established a presidential right to do just about anything imaginable. While the get-tough aura of torture may indeed have appealed to some of these worshippers of power, what undoubtedly appealed to them most was the moving of the presidential goalposts, the changing of the rules. From Abu Ghraib on, the results of all this have been obvious enough, but one crucial aspect of such unfettered presidential power goes regularly unmentioned...
...Congress is in the hands of Republicans, many of whom share the President's fervor for unconstrained party as well as presidential power; and the will to impeach is, as yet, hardly in sight...
But Hell, what do I know? I'm just what Bush would call a defeatist.
I'm a defeatist with a far greater stake in Bush's wars than he himself has.
James Glaser, a Vietnam veteran and American Legion Post commander wrote about the Defeatist nametag:
George Bush might call me a defeatist. But I'm telling you we are not even close to winning Bush's war in Iraq. We have been in Iraq almost three years, and American troops are still in a lock down. No American trooper can take a stroll down the streets of Baghdad or any other Iraqi city.
George Bush is so afraid of the truth coming out about his war in Iraq, and the position we are in over there, that he has resorted to name-calling of anyone who speaks his mind...
...Right off the bat George says the people who disagree with him and his war are "partisans." Merriam Webster defines a partisan as "one who exhibits blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance." George is hinting that those "partisans" who disagree with him are just Democrats who are trying to tear him down and the country with him. What George Bush does not realize is that many of the people who now believe that George Bush's Iraq War was a mistake from the start and a war we can't win, do have an allegiance, but that allegiance is not to the Democrat party or even the Republican party, but to the American Constitution, and to the American troops George has sent on this fool's mission.
When George Bush says, "For every life lost, there are countless more lives reclaimed," he has no basis for that statement. America has told the world that "we don't do body counts." According to the Secretary of Defense and his top generals, we have no idea of how many Iraqis we have killed and using the number "countless lives reclaimed" is so nebulous that it has no meaning at all.
George claims that there is more rebuilding going on in Iraq than scenes of destruction. Watch the evening news and look at the videos they show, and see if you can spot this massive rebuilding effort. The Iraqi people have fewer than 12 hours of electricity a day and on many days fewer than six. We, the United States of America, destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Iraq at the start of this war. That is a war crime. The fact is that Iraq produces less electricity today than before we attacked. Iraq pumps less oil and refines less gasoline than before we attacked, and they now must import fuel from other countries. Without electricity, drinking water does not get purified, and sewage treatment comes to a halt
Bush goes on to state the obvious - we have more troops than the terrorists have. What is also obvious is that most of the people fighting us are not terrorists, but Iraqi citizens trying to kick our troops out of their country.
It is a fact that our troops can not walk or even ride around Iraq on their off-duty time. Iraq is a total combat zone for American troops. Our military command and our embassy staff are locked up in a place called the Green Zone in Baghdad, where extraordinary security is provided because of the constant threat of attack by insurgents - insurgents who are thought of by many Iraqis as patriots.
I must give George Bush a bit of a break though. George Bush never went to war. George was the right age when his country put out a "call to arms" looking for patriotic Americans to defend our country, but George never heard that call. Because George Bush never went to war, he is really in the dark when it comes to understanding what is going on in Iraq. Bush has no idea of the suffering we are inflicting on the Iraqi people nor is he able to understand what he is asking of our troops. Without knowing what war and combat entail, George Bush does not possess the knowledge needed to claim that we are winning.
George Bush is trying to paint a rosy picture about Iraq, and the help we are getting from the Iraqi people. That might have been true in the euphoria of defeating Saddam Hussein, but we have been fighting there too long, and we have worn out our welcome. The British Sunday Telegraph reports about attacks on coalition troops:
The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.
Other views, moreover, are more negative: Fewer than half, 46 percent, say the country is better off now than it was before the war. And half of Iraqis now say it was wrong for U.S.-led forces to invade in spring 2003, up from 39 percent in 2004.
The number of Iraqis who say things are going well in their country overall is just 44 percent, far fewer than the 71 percent who say their own lives are going well. Fifty-two percent instead say the country is doing badly.
There's other evidence of the United States' increasing unpopularity. Two-thirds now oppose the presence of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, 14 points higher than in February 2004. Nearly six in 10 disapprove of how the United States has operated in Iraq since the war, and most of them disapprove strongly. And nearly half of Iraqis would like to see U.S. forces leave soon.
Two thirds of Iraqis oppose our presence in Iraq, and George Bush says we are winning this war. Of course many in George Bush's administration told us before we attacked, that the Iraqi people would lay flower petals in our troops' path. That didn't happen. Instead they laid down hidden explosive devices and killed and wounded almost 20,000 of our troops.
Think about these facts: 2,180 American Soldiers and Marines are dead, 16,155 are wounded, and tens of thousands have psychological problems after their return from the combat zone. Somewhere between 35,000 and 110,000 innocent Iraqis are dead, tens of thousands more are maimed (we really don't keep a count) and still more are displaced. Iraq was a pitiful third-world country when we attacked. They had no navy, no air force, outdated weapons, and poorly trained troops. It is now almost three years later, and no American is safe any place in Iraq, and George Bush says we are winning.
George Bush is the "partisan" here, not me. I just don't know what faction he is giving his blind allegiance to, but I do know it is not to our troops, or our nation's Constitution, or the truth.
I may be a defeatist, but I'm not the reason our soldiers are being killed and our military is being defeated. There is only ONE way to end the cycle of death in Iraq - and that is for CONGRESS to exercise their constitutional authority to END THE OCCUPATION.
Rebuild Iraq? Sure. Write a check and let the Iraqis do it.
I am reminded of a quote from Seven Pillars of Wisdom, by T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia): "It is better that they do it imperfectly than that you do it perfectly. For it is their war and their country and your time here is limited."
Time's up.