One Thousand

Many reasons have been advanced as to just why we all but abandoned the hunt for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to pursue our splendid little war in Iraq. Some say we attacked to satisfy George W. Bush's personal quest for revenge against the man who "tried to kill my daddy." Others cite the imperial fantasies of the Administration neoconservatives, or the American oil industry's thirst for Iraq's oil reserves, or other reasons, or all of the above.

Some even believe the official White House reason. Never mind that the reason keeps changing on an almost daily basis, mutating from Saddam Hussein's vast weapons-of-mass-destruction arsenal to his highly advanced weapons programs to his could-possibly-be-a-threat-someday-if-the-stars-are-aligned-properly programs, to his "capability" of having such programs. There was Saddam's hidden hand behind 9/11, which became his propensity for giving WMD to terrorists, which became an undefined "relationship" with al Qaeda. There was also his undeniably brutal dictatorship, but that was just peachy with us during his charnel-house war with Iran back in the 1980s. The constantly shifting justifications seem to have finally centered more or less on the charge that Saddam was a very bad man.

But whatever reason you choose, from saving humanity to a new Crusade for the 21st century, there can be little doubt that what was grandly named Operation Iraqi Freedom has become a nightmare in the desert. We have earned the hatred of the world, have poured more than $135 billion into the sand (just think of what we could have accomplished with that money here at home!), and have now sent our one-thousandth American to his death there.

Sixteen months and more than 800 lives ago, President Bush (who went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War and escaped the consequences thanks to his family connections) pulled off his little Top Gun stunt by landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. He declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended," in a statement that surely ranks right up there as one of the most blissfully ignorant things ever said.

Since then, we have watched in numb horror as the bodies piled up and the casualty lists grew longer. We were told that the killing of Uday and Qusay Hussein would end the fighting. Then we were told that Saddam's capture would end the fighting. Then we were told that the "transfer of sovereignty" to a handpicked group of Iraqis would end the fighting. None of them turned out as planned. The fighting goes on, and the corpses continue to come home.

And every time a family back home got the news no family should ever receive, we were told that their sacrifice was heroic, that their sons and daughters died to win the War on Terror™, regardless of the fact that the Bush Administration discarded it to pursue their little Mesopotamian vendetta.

We do not yet know just who became casualty #1000, but we do know several things about him.

We know that his remains will land at Dover Air Force Base in the middle of the night, stealthily brought back into the country by a military convinced that the sight of our soldiers returning in flag-draped coffins must be hidden from the American people lest people ask why they had to die in the first place.

We know that Bush will not go to his funeral, just as he has refused to attend the funerals of any of the young men and women who went to Iraq to die at his command.

And we know that he will not be the last to die, as George W. Bush is inexorably committed to "staying the course." Never mind the fact that there is no course to stay, there is only a perpetual holding action with no strategy, no end and increasingly no purpose.

Some may say that I am allowing my anger to leak through as I write these words. You're right, I am angry.

I am angry at the uncaring waste of American and Iraqi life. I am angry at those who never themselves fought in a war but eagerly send others to their deaths on an ideological whim while brushing off the warnings of the veterans who know what combat is like. I am angry at those who praise noble sacrifice with one hand and cut service pay and medical benefits with the other. I am angry at everyone who sees our men and women in uniform not as individual people with families and hopes and dreams, but as faceless numbers to be thrown away.

And I am angry at the puppet masters in power who seem to believe that endlessly telling the same lies over and over again will magically transform them into truths.

Voting George W. Bush and his crowd of ideologues out of power on November 2 will not bring back the people who have died because of their negligence and incompetence. But it will ensure that no one else has to follow in their grim footsteps.