Written by: Liberal Jarhead
This is Liberal Jarhead's response to the first comment left on this post.
James,
Pretty impressive numbers you tossed out. Now let's compare the population of California to the number of Americans and Brits in Iraq and get per capita death rates.
The US Census Bureau estimates that 35,893,799 people lived in that state as of 2004, making that about 1 homicide for every 14,933 people. The combined US and UK troop strength in Iraq is about 160,000, making that one death for every 177 troops. In other words, the casualty rate in Iraq is over 84 times the murder rate in California. So which place would you rather take your chances? Ready to sign up, get that "we O U body and vehicle armor" chit, and go on patrol in Baghdad? I didn't think so.
As the man said, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Which category does your misleading presentation of the numbers fall into?
Anyway, you can't measure the rightness or wrongness, necessity or otherwise, evil or less evil of a war by body counts. Human beings are not beans, no matter what the bean counters think, and that the fact that fewer Americans have died than in other wars doesn't make this okay. They used to call this kind of war LIC, or Low Intensity Conflict, as if it was less of a big deal than a High Intensity Conflict; but as the tactics instructors at Quantico used to tell us, if you're the one with the sucking chest wound, it's pretty fucking high intensity as far as you're concerned that day.
If this war were for a legitimate cause, as WW2 was, deaths (of whatever nationality) would be necessary but still tragic and obscene, the lesser of evils. When the whole thing is based on lies, egos, and self-delusions, it's not necessary - just tragic and obscene.
I had an epiphany when I was 18, the first time I had to search a mangled corpse for ID and try to match up the pieces (there were lots of mismatched pieces that day) and get them all together in the right body bag. I realized that if it was a movie, there would have been some sweet wistful music playing, and it would have all had some higher meaning. But all I could hear was the buzzing of the flies, and there was no higher meaning, and it smelled like the devil's barbecue, and it was making me crazy that I couldn't get the sticky gore off my hands (I can't stand the feel of finger foods to this day.) I realized that this was horror, and my job was to try my hardest to do this to other people while they tried to do it to my friends and me. And I felt an obscene shame and humiliation at having been naive enough to buy into the glamorization and the intellectualization and the tough-guy rhetoric.
Yes, when we volunteer we commit ourselves to fight where we are sent. It has to be that way, because if the military starts usurping those decisions from the civilian government, you end up with a military dictatorship. My prayer was never "Don't let them send me to die." But it sure as hell was "Don't let them throw my life away - if they're going to spend me, make it for a good reason."
There have been a very few wars that were necessary, but this isn't one of them. If it was, they wouldn't have needed to make up one lie after another to justify it - they could have just told the truth about their reasons and most of the American people would have understood and agreed.
I am a proud patriotic Democrat who put my ass on the line for 20 years to protect my country, unlike that strutting bully Bush who got Daddy to help him dodge it, unlike Cheney, Rove, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Frist, Delay, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, etc. (Rumsfeld did serve, and John McCain is a hero - but Bush trashed McCain.) And I am AWAKE, thank you very much. When I was 18, I was a conservative Republican. Those 20 years turned me into a liberal Democrat.
We have been lied to by both Republicans and Democrats many times - but this administration is the most dishonest and corrupt since at least Harding and possibly ever. And the fact that Democrats have lied doesn't make it okay for Republicans to lie, any more than it works the other way around when Democrats are in power. Any administration that starts an illegitimate war or, if it inherits one, continues it a day longer than necessary to get out in a reasonable way, is guilty of crimes against humanity.
By their fruits ye shall know them... look at who is benefiting from this war. No one, except contractors, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, and the Republicans in 2004. A pretty damn weird way to fight a war on terrorists (not war on terror - terror is an emotion, not a country, not a group of people, not a political movement. Anyway, on the American political scene, this administration has done more to scare Americans than Bin Laden has.) If I was going to fight terrorists, I wouldn't do it by polarizing the formerly moderate and fairly friendly majority of Muslims against us, turning Iraq into a permanent recruiting film and training ground for them, grinding the US military into the dust, breaking the US economy in the process, and cutting funding for domestic first responders and veterans' benefits.
This isn't about Democrats and Republicans. It's about what's good for this country. And what's happening now isn't good.
Cross posted at Bring It On