So by now I’m sure you’re all aware that we’re winning the war in Iraq. No, really, it’s as good as won actually. The surge is working. Troop fatalities dropped to under 40 in October as well as November, the lowest monthly totals since March of ’06.* And those totals each represent nearly a 75% drop in monthly US combat deaths since the peak when 126 were killed in May of this year. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to break out the Schlitz and vote for Mike Huckabee!
Now, what’s scary about the above sentiments, is that the staunchest Democratic opponent of this debacle of a war actually did say on Thursday that “the surge is working.”** John Murtha, Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and a former US Marine, has just done what you were hoping and praying he wouldn’t… he embraced his inner Democrat and turned tail. This is the same man who has blasted Bush and Cheney repeatedly and with great conviction to the point of choking back tears on several occasions as he demanded our troops be redeployed out of Iraq. He was one of the few who genuinely seemed to care about the human tragedy behind the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld war machine. But like all the other sheep in both parties and the press, Murtha joined in turning this war into a stock ticker, and right now the Dow Jones Military Casualty Index is hitting a record high by hitting a record low… in deaths.
That’s what this war has come to. So pathetic was this abysmal “preemptive” battle from its inception, so low has the bar now been set by the incompetent rogue in the Oval Office, and so cynical and apathetic are our politicians and media at this point, that the only thing left for them to chew on are numbers. So the sheep chew on them like cud. And as long as those numbers keep dropping like mortgage rates in ’05, we’re in for a good little run! Of course, just like the mortgage rates were in no way reflective of reality, these declining death rates are also no measure of the true impact this war has had and continues to have. These are lives, each of these numbers, and this war is a human tragedy, not a math game. I thought of all people, John Murtha understood that. Guess not.
*These figures are meticulously recorded for posterity at the following site: http://icasualties.org/oif/)
**http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ibDeMEMDEYv4V-eqfWH0lbqZe6RwD8T8CL702
Jack Silbert, curator