US Soldiers Keep Dying for Bush’s Legacy
by Ian Mosley
The war in Iraq drags on and on and on. This could be George Orwell’s “war without end” predicted in his book “1984.” A few days ago both houses of Congress conducted an absolutely farcical “debate” on the disastrous Iraq war. The construction of four huge permanent bases and the mammoth US Embassy in Baghdad continues. The body bags and the flag-draped coffins keep coming back, although we are still not allowed to photograph them, and it is clear that the neocons mean for America to stay in Iraq forever. They do not care how many die.
A recent news article reports “The number of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq war has reached 2,500, the Pentagon said Thursday, more than three years into a conflict that finds U.S. and allied foreign forces locked in a struggle with a resilient insurgency. In addition, the Pentagon said 18,490 U.S. troops have been wounded in the war.”
The actual numbers of dead and wounded are probably higher, given the various creative ways that the Pentagon uses to conceal what’s actually going on over there. The wounded are for the most part not suffering from mere Hollywood style flesh wounds –the kind action heroes and TV cops routinely get. Wounds from IEDs have produced thousands of amputees. If this continues, the sight of armless and legless war veterans will become as common a sight in America as it was after the Civil War.
No one knows how many Iraqis have died; it is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands. No one knows how many Iraqis have fled to other Muslim countries to escape the cruel and brutal occupation, including the bizarre homosexual humiliation of Muslim men by US soldiers (under orders from the neocons) at Abu Ghraib prison which is still not closed down, despite Bush’s promises when the scandal was revealed. No one knows how many Iraqis have simply been murdered in their homes by rampaging American troops, as in the appalling massacre of unarmed civilians and infant children in Haditha.
More than three years after the unprovoked invasion of March 2003, US forces are locked in a struggle with a resilient insurgency that gives no sign whatsoever of giving up, and which appears to be getting stronger every day. Three years after the invasion, the American military, mightiest in the world, still cannot control an eight-mile stretch of highway between Baghdad and the airport; this is why when Bush and Rummy and Condi Rice make their “surprise” visits to cheer up the troops, they always have to be helicoptered into the Green Zone.
The puppet Iraqi government squabbles and cowers in the heavily-fortified Green Zone; they do not even control their own capital, and their “ministers” cannot set foot on the streets of Baghdad except in heavily armored American convoys. Reporters and TV journalists can no longer leave their bunker-like fortified luxury hotels; to do so invites kidnapping and death at the hands of the Iraqi rebels. The oil flow from Iraq is less that ten per cent of what it was in the last year before the invasion; the rebels keep blowing up the pipelines. The endless sweeps of the American military across the wide Iraqi landscape in search of insurgents is like trying to hold back the sea with a broom.
And it will not change, because Republicans won’t admit their main man is a mad man, who needs to be impeached so his finger can no longer push the button to start World War Three. Perhaps the Democrats will take back the House and Senate as the public finally voices its opinion on the Iraq War in 2006. If they do, let’s hope they have enough of a backbone to impeach the gibbering lunatic in the Oval Office instead of giving him two more years to waste the lives of American soldiers.