Thursday, August 23, 2007
Dead
Being an ex-GI, I read with sorrow and outrage about how many of our troops are getting killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. You read online and on paper about the 3 - 4 and more GIs who are getting killed seemingly each day. Occasionally you'll see higher numbers - 14 in crash here, 8 in an attack there. It adds up. Something like 3600 dead as of now, and no one really wants to admit how many wounded - but I'm guessing 20,000 - 30,000 (based on a 1 in 7 survival rate). That's a lot of blood.
I think most people, at least those who don't still believe Saddam planned and executed 9/11, realize that we got into Iraq based on lies. We haven't found any so-called weapons of mass destruction and the terrorists are still running around blowing stuff up. However, gasoline is still cheap in the USofA, so I guess that reason has been fulfilled. The trouble is, like Brer Rabbit, we're stuck in that crappy mess. Getting out isn't going to help Iraq - it'll decline to even greater levels of violence and eventually the fundamentalists will take over and the country will be worse off than it is now. We can't stay either, since we're not going to fix thousands of years of sectarian violence with Big Macs, M-16s and Stryker APCs.
The real losers are in Iraq. We can leave and go home. The Iraqis are home. While we've had 30,000 dead and wounded, just how many do you think they've had. Nobody's been keeping an accurate body count - most people don't even care. The Iraqis are some faceless people who were under Saddam and are now free - free of food, free of water, free of electricity and free of freedom in general. However since every time we see 4 or 5 GIs blown in the news, that's usually followed by 40 - 50 Iraqis. That's ten to one - that means 300,000 - 400,000 dead and wounded?
That's what really sucks.
Labels: government, military
