5 more today….
Five more U.S. soldiers died today in Anbar province, bringing the death toll for the month to 96. That’s a total that hasn’t been exceeded since January, 2005, twenty-two months ago. And what kind of administration response is there to this carnage? A change in semantics. Whether we were ever “stay-the-course” or not now seems to be the major discourse. But you know what? Whatever we were, or are, it’s not working! And we still haven’t heard the Bush administration utter a single new, original, different thought, about what we should do.
We are apparently putting a lot of hope in this Baker report, that won’t be released until sometime after the election. Because apparently he is going to be some kind of genius who will figure out a way for us to “win the war” and make everything better. Harps will play, angels will descend, deus ex machina, and we will finally be greeted as liberators.
And we aren’t going to see this report until a minimum of 13 days from now (Baker hinted that the report might not be out until early next year), because we wouldn’t want it to sway the election. We wouldn’t want the public to possibly hear that we might be doing something wrong over there. Well, by my math, that means, that at the current daily rate for this month, that another 48 U.S. soldiers will die before we even start to talk about doing something differently. That means another 48 of these will be coming home.
As near as I can tell, there’s only one sure way to stop this death toll from going higher. It’s called troop withdrawal. You can call it “cut and run”, you can call it “defeatist thinking”, apparently now, you can even call it “stay the course”. I don’t care what you call it. Just start doing it. Because our troops are currently stuck in the middle of a civil war where the only thing the two warring sides can agree upon is that they don’t want us there.
I’m just saying…….
Except that some people do want us there. I am not saying the war was even a good idea to begin with. Dont misunderstand me, but I am saying that I have family there in the midst of this. I’ve got friends over there. All I know is what they tell me from Iraq and from Afghanistan. Not just news reports. I’ve talked to them online while mortars are flying over the tents that they are emailing me from. ANd what they tell em is that they want to come home. But they can’t now. They want to stop being criticized, kind of like the adage of “hey man I jsut work here” You have to understand that some of these folks really believe in what they are doing even if it is because of the few natives that tell them thank you. They made a choice to enlist and knew of the possibility of combat, as do all people who choose to be in the service. So far as I know there is no draft. There needs to be more world pressure (not just pressure from the US) on these countries to end this so that we CAN get our friends and families home. It seemed to work for N korea? Yes this war was a very bad decision, but the fact is that we are in it. We are in the middle of a civil war and training all of the people who want to kill our troops! I realize hat a lot of the politics in thse countries are religious and ethnic, however outdated those types of seperation are, and that we cannot solve those problems by “enforcing democracy,” but we can help the leaders to take control of their county. Terrorists bombers snipers and people who want us dead are not the only people that live there. There are families who are scared, regular people just trying to live but they live in fear from things that have been happening even before the US got involved. There needs to be a change in tactics for sure, but the question is where do we go from here? what is the next step? I do not have the answer for those questions. I just want my family and my friends to come home safely.