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At the present death rate, Iraq is suffering a 9/11 every month.

In response to today’s news that “U.S. launches largest Iraq air assault in 3 years,” MSC writes a powerful diary containing scripture plus photos.

2,000 dead U.S. soldiers today.

Multiple 10,000s dead Iraqi citizens.

All beloved of their families. All children of God.

All dead.

For what? For whom?

I grieve.

I rage.

“A senior White House official has denied that the US president, George Bush, said God ordered him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.”

“What Americans are finally catching onto is the utter incompetence of this crowd. And if we didn’t know before, we’re learning now, in the harshest possible ways, that incompetence has bitter consequences.”

Did Washington try to manipulate Iraq’s election?

“If we believe that the present war in Iraq is just and necessary, why do we shrink from looking at the damage it wreaks? … Of the liberated, occupied, afflicted, battered-to-despair Iraqi people, Americans see and hear and, worst of all, care almost nothing.”

I think invading Iraq has always been a wrong thing done wrong. Now how do we move toward the “right thing done right” quadrant?

The possibility of democracy in Iraq must not eclipse the tragedy of American lives lost and Iraqis sacrificed in a reckless and needless military venture based on falsehood.

“This [Iraq] war is a strategic mistake. We have made enemies for life. There will be revenge against us for life.”

An imagined monologue from God, peering up from God’s browser (arising from Eyes Wide Open exhibit, after musing on “counting the cost”).

In this critical time, Eyes Wide Open speaks directly to our hearts and minds, shattering the claim that the war has made America safer and challenging us to confront our fears and let our dreams, not our nightmares, shape our collective future.

NY Times: Bob Herbert: ‘This will never be seen as a shining moment in U.S. history.’

Here’s what I think is the simplest basis on which to decide one’s upcoming vote (or nonvote) for U.S. president.

Observed sequence of events:

1. Command given to invade Iraq for a stated reason ¹

2. As a direct result, so far

• 1,067 Americans dead
• 7,531 Americans wounded
• ~15,000 Iraqi men, women, and children dead
  100,000 Iraqi dead according to study published in British medical journal The Lancet (approximately zero of whom had anything to do with 9/11)
• Iraqis wounded “too high to count” in April 2003 (Red Cross).
  How many more 10,000s since then?
• $140B spent in Iraq, $200B committed
  (Note that given 280M Americans, $200B -> $700/person.)

3. Stated reason proves to be wrong ²

¹ Primary stated reason: “Iraq has WMD including nuclear and biological weapons, and intent to use them, and is therefore an imminent threat to the United States” (paraphrased) (more info).

² Actual outcome: Iraq had no weapons and posed no threat to the U.S. (Duelfer report, Oct. 7, 2004: WaPo summary, actual report).

Time’s up, game over, no do-overs.

No one in any field keeps their job after a mistake of this magnitude. It’s nothing personal; prudence and public safety demands leave, demotion, or outright firing of the person or persons involved in massively deadly mistakes like this. Always.

Further, just as in the corporate world, we the people who exercise oversight over the position of U.S. president will be held accountable if we don’t demote or fire the person or persons involved.

Every other voting consideration in this election, while many are important, factors out of this particular equation.

I think the bottom-line decision really is this simple.

Bonus upside:
The field of rehires looks really good. Great resumes, fine presentation.

NOTE: Making up alternative reasons for invading after the fact is not allowed. (For example, say your kid wrecks the car. If he keeps making up reasons why he did it, will he eventually hit on a reason you’ll buy? Of course not. Reasons aren’t retroactive.)

WaPo: David Broder: ‘Bush is dragging two huge weights — and he has no one to blame but himself.’

LA Times: Editorial: ‘Bush’s doctrine of preemption undermines President John Quincy Adams’ understanding that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”’ (paraphrased).

WaPo: Robin Wright quoting Ted Galen Carpenter: ‘It’s a lesson in hubris. The administration thought it had all the answers, but it found out through painful experience that it did not.’

In assessing the scenes about the Flint, Michigan mother who lost her son in Iraq, Goldstein captures well why I think all parents should see this movie, why each must be full-on aware of the cost of supporting Mr. Bush: There is only one casus belli that could possibly justify visiting this kind of emotional devastation on a mother, only one cause sufficient to permit a society to ask a parent to make a sacrifice so great that it leaves them lost in an endless desert of grief, a blasted husk of a human being …. For example, Rex recalls this funny tidbit: Unless you’ve lost your sense of humor completely, you’ve just gotta laugh when Mr. Moore intercuts Mr. Bush’s tough talk from cowboy movies with actual footage of the corny cowboys in those movies saying exactly the same things.

On April 7, Tami Silicio, a civilian contract worker, captured a somber-yet-tasteful photograph of an aircraft cargo hold full of U.S. flag-draped coffins of soldiers being returned from Iraq via Kuwait (similar to the photo shown here — see update at end of this entry).

The Seattle Times published Silicio’s photo on April 19 in article The somber task of honoring the fallen (alternate photo location) —

On the April day depicted in the photograph that accompanies this story, more than 20 coffins went into a cargo plane bound for Germany [from Kuwait]. Silicio says those who lost loved ones in Iraq should understand the care and devotion that civilians and military crews dedicate to the task of returning the soldiers home.

Two days later on April 21, Tami’s employer, U.S. military contractor Maytag Aircraft Corp. fires her and her husband, as reported in the Boston Globe, Woman fired by military contractor for published photograph of flag-draped U.S. coffins.

This really bugs me. I understand (but don’t accept) the point that Maytag Aircraft Corp. is within rights firing an employee if that employee breaks a no-photos policy. And I understand the point that some families of the dead may not want media publicity, although I don’t see how the anonymity of flag-draped coffins invades anyone’s privacy. I see it more as honoring their sacrifice. (See Seattle Times, Images of war dead a sensitive subject.)

But I’m calling a spade a spade: This no-photos policy is government censorship, a hiding of the harsh realities of war from the U.S. populace, exposure to which might give the most gung-ho warhawks pause, during which pause the realization might dawn that it is failed U.S. policy that is killing these troops.

If we can’t state clearly why these sons and daughters and friends and relatives are dying and why “it’s worth it,” then we need to move heaven and earth to stop the dying. Now.

Every day we are silent means new cargo holds full of coffins, just like the one Tami photographed, returning home in secret, day after day after day.

My whole life I’ve wondered how so many German Christians in the 1930s could stand by as Nazi fascism rose to power. Now I think I know: being silent, being passive, giving tacit approval, enabled its rise. We’re enabling its rise again. If I sound like I’m overstating, see if the dictionary definition isn’t sounding eerily familiar:

fas·cism. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.

Our U.S. “belligerent nationalism” is, sad to say, obvious to the whole world. As to the racism, it’s visible in our having killed an estimated 10,000+ Iraqi civilians, whom we’re not even bothering to count accurately. Many of these were innocents, and nearly all of them have families now bearing all the reason anyone needs to seek revenge, retaliation, retribution. Just as we’re doing, some of these victims’ friends and families will act to effect retribution. Liberation my ass. Liberating people from their bodies is not liberation. We are making the world’s terror situation incomparably worse:

“When the fighting is over in Fallujah, I will sell everything I have, even my home,” said a resistance fighter who gave his name as Abu Taif Mashhadani. He wept as he recalled his 8-year-old daughter, who he said was killed by a U.S. sniper in Fallujah a week ago. “I will send my brothers north to kill the Kurds, and I will go to America and target the civilians. Only the civilians. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. And the one who started it will be the one to be blamed.”
—Revolts in Iraq Deepen Crisis In Occupation (via Billmon)

If there’s hopeful news whispering within this deadly cacophony, I think it’s this: we’re only three requirements short of getting back on track. We need to —

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly.
(Now this is anti-terrorism!)

A detailed plan? No — this is a new direction that affects all plans and likely leads to altogether different ends. Can we do these things? To my surprise, I believe we can. One at a time, each of us learns, each of us chooses. And I have a hunch I’m Monkey #94.

[story links via Daily Kos and The Village Gate]

2004-04-23 update: And the wall comes a-tumblin’ down? Even if in slo-mo overall, this came quickly: The New York Times runs story today, Pentagon Ban on Pictures of Dead Troops Is Broken. Bill Kick, operator of The Memory Hole, filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year asking for photos of coffins arriving from Iraq at Dover AFB in Delaware:

The Pentagon yesterday labeled the Air Force Air Mobility Command’s decision to grant the request a mistake, but news organizations quickly used a selection of the 361 images taken by Defense Department photographers.

The release of the photographs came one day after a contractor working for the Pentagon fired a woman who had taken photographs of coffins being loaded onto a transport plane in Kuwait. …

The firing underscored the strictness with which the Pentagon and the Bush administration have pursued a policy of forbidding news organizations to showing images of the homecomings of the war dead at military bases. …

A New York Times/CBS News poll taken in December found that 62 percent of Americans said the public should be allowed to see pictures of the military honor guard receiving the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq as they are returned to the United States. Twenty-seven percent said the public should not be.

MilitaryWeek.com: Karen Kwiatkowski: ‘The soldier [just back from Iraq] was asked what Arabic he had been taught in order to do his job … “Stop. Get down. Kneel. Shut up.”’

I was wondering about this at lunch [on Aug 8], and now — lo and behold — Kos has pointed out, using data from Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, that

We have now lost more men and women [after] the fall of the Baghdad statue [than before].

That’s 258 Americans plus 44 Brits dead, 54 of them since Bush said “Bring ‘em on.”

We’re coming up way too rapidly on more killed after Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln than before.

Of course, as I attribute to Iraqi people equal, inestimable value in the sight of God, I am compelled to note that the reported Iraqi civilian death count at Iraq Body Count is now 6,087–7,798.

2003-08-26 update: We’ve hit another sad milestone that can’t be erased, can’t be undone. This, paraphrased from the AP, as alerted by RonK at dKos:

We have now lost more men and women after Mr. Bush announced from the aircraft carrier that “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended” than before.

That’s now 277 Americans plus 49 Brits dead (according to ICCC).

And today’s Iraq Body Count numbering of Iraqi civilian deaths: 6,113–7,830. (Iraqi casualty count is 20,000+.)

2003-08-10 update: Today I see in passing an interesting (and related) letter at the Horse that depicts an even grimmer reality. Note the following consequence of word misuse applies independent of one’s political position:

AP has been misusing the word “casualty” with regard to the “preemptive” US action in Iraq with dismaying regularity.

Today’s example [Mike: I’m not sure when “today” was] from Yahoo[:]

  Since President Bush announced an end to major
  combat in Iraq on May 1, 56 soldiers have died
  in combat. The total combat casualties in the
  war has climbed to 170 …

The true number of casualties is much higher, likely in the thousands.

A “casualty” is not only a dead soldier. The word also signifies the injured, captured, and MIA.

Misusing the word “casualty” to report only combat deaths misleads the reader into believing the number of US soldiers whose lives have been shattered by this chosen war is an order of magnitude smaller than is actually the case.

If your only experience of war is from watching TV where bloodless bullets drop soldiers with a gentle “Ugh”, perhaps it’s hard to appreciate how long it takes for a skull fracture to heal, how demoralizing it feels to return to your wife without legs, or the unimaginable frustration of doing anything without hands. Please do not trivialize the sacrifice of these men by washing away their numbers away through a dishonest choice of words. …

If you mean to count the dead, dare to use the word “dead”. If you mean to count casualties, dare to count them all.

Cmdr. MacBragg
PsyOps Unit 44
Groom Lake AFB

Veteran war reporter Robert Fisk tours the Baghdad hospital and writes in the UK’s The Independent, This is the reality of war. We bomb. They suffer:

Donald Rumsfeld says the American attack on Baghdad is “as targeted an air campaign as has ever existed” but he should not try telling that to five-year-old Doha Suheil. She looked at me yesterday morning, drip feed attached to her nose, a deep frown over her small face as she tried vainly to move the left side of her body. The cruise missile that exploded close to her home in the Radwaniyeh suburb of Baghdad blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs — they were bound up with gauze — and, far more seriously, into her spine. Now she has lost all movement in her left leg. [via AlterNet]

On reading this, this verse leaped into my mind:

And the King will answer and say to them, “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” (Matthew 25:40 NKJV)

(Not to mention what we’re not doing for hungry/thirsty/lonely/naked/ sick/imprisoned brethren because we’re sinking an unbudgeted $80 billion into this war.)

Quickly thereafter I was struck by this wording in today’s Old Testament lesson (3rd Sunday in Lent, Episcopal lectionary Year B):

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

Note that we have in no small way used the name of the Lord to justify this war in Iraq. Wrongful use of his name? I think so, emphatically. (Because what we’re doing is the exact opposite of what Jesus commands.) Of course, what matters — and apparently it matters a hell of a lot — is what the Lord thinks.

2003-03-26 update: Full text of the Fisk interview here, including links to audio versions. Highly worthwhile reading. This paragraph jumps out at me:

Obviously, we know that with the firepower they have the Americans can batter their way into these cities and they can take over Baghdad, but the moral ethos behind this war is that you Americans are supposed to be coming to liberate this place. And, if you’re going to have to smash your way into city after city using armor and helicopters and aircraft, then the whole underpinning and purpose of this war just disappears, and, the world — which has not been convinced thus far, who thinks this is a wrong war and an unjust war — are going to say, “Then what is this for? They don’t want to be liberated by us.” And that’s when we’re going to come down to the old word: Oil.

Officials are concerned that if America strikes first, it will appear the U.S. has started a war.