Bush's Scorekeeping System for Iraq: more deaths mean we are doing better: "President Bush explained last week how he was keeping score on the Iraqi conflict. Speaking on a day when at least 35 people died in a coordinated wave of suicide attacks in and around Baghdad, the president said, "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react."
By this terrifyingly blithe logic, we should soon be celebrating yet higher body counts. "

How can Bush really claim to care about the soldiers he is commanding? I mean, he's saying that the more of them who die, the better we are doing. This is insane. He supposedly went in there so Americans wouldn't die. But now the more that die, the better?

Well Mr. Bush, you must have celebrated the downing of that Chinook yesterday. By your logic, I guess that shows you are doing even better than you thought, with all those US soldiers dying and all?

Even if you think Iraq was a threat to the US before we invaded, which I don't, you have to agree with this writer, who says... "our discovery that the regime of weapons inspections that lasted from 1991 to 1998 had been far more effective than we thought means that we might have purchased our security at a far lighter cost."

The truth is that we didn't need to spend any money to get protection from Iraq, because there wasn't any threat. The UN inspections were working. US planes were attacking Iraqi air defences almost every day from the air in the north and south of the country. And the country was crippled from 10 years of stringent economic sanctions. All the people who have died as a result of this invasion have been killed unnecessarily. They are blood on this administration's hands.

As for the other justifications for the war, the main one being that Saddam was dreadful and a danger to his own people, within his own borders, let's take a look at that.

Saddam was a violent, ruthless, appallingly cruel murderer. There is no question about that. He was also a US ally when he gassed the Kurds. And our government issued a mild "tut tut" rebuke. He was our proxy, fighting the Iranians. We didn't care about the Kurds then. We didn't care about them after Pres Bush 1 encouraged them and the Si'ite arabs in the south to rebel against Saddam in 91 / 92. We only claimed to care about them more than a decade later. And then it was a shameful and hollow pretext for an unjustified war.

The question comes down to this for me. Do the Iraqi's have more rights, especially the basic right to safety and security now than they did under Saddam? I take my answer from ordinary Iraqi's. They are frequently quoted in news reports saying that they preferred to be as safe as they were under Saddam to the economic freedoms that the occupation is offering. In other words, they feel they are worse off now. We have given them Economic hopes, and actual death.

That is the greatest failure of all of the US invasion. After all the loss of life and the costs, Iraqi's are worse off. And the losses are increasing without any prospect of end, without anything more than bluster from Bush and Rumsfeld.

By the way, how come Rumsfeld is still in office? Just wondering.

- posted by geoff @ #