[Mb-civic] Bob Herbert

[Mike Blaxill]

Driving Blind as the Deaths Pile Up
    By Bob Herbert
    The New York Times

    Thursday 27 October 2005

    Much of the nation is mourning the more than
2,000 American G.I.'s lost to the war in Iraq.
But some of the mindless Washington weasels who
sent those brave and healthy warriors to their
unnecessary doom have other things on their
minds. They're scrambling about the capital,
huddling frantically with lawyers, hoping that
their habits of deception, which are a way of
life with them, don't finally land them in a
federal penitentiary.

    See them sweat. The most powerful of the
powerful, the men who gave the president his
talking points and his marching orders, are
suddenly sending out distress signals: Don't let
them send me to prison on a technicality.

    This is not, however, about technicalities.
You can spin it any way you want, but Patrick
Fitzgerald's investigation of Karl Rove, Scooter
Libby et al. is ultimately about the monumentally
conceived and relentlessly disseminated deceit
that gave us the war that never should have
happened.

    Oh, it was heady stuff for a while - nerds
and naïfs swapping fantasies of world domination
and giddily manipulating the levers of American
power. They were oh so arrogant and glib: Weapons
of mass destruction. Yellowcake from Niger. The
smoking gun morphing into a mushroom cloud.

    Now look at what they've wrought. James Dao
of The Times began his long article on the 2,000
American dead with a story that was as typical as
it was tragic:

    "Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, fresh off the plane
from Iraq and an impish grin on his face,
sauntered unannounced into his wife's hospital
room in Georgia just hours after she had given
birth to their second son."

    The article described how Sergeant Jones,
over a blissful two-week period last May, "cooed
over their baby and showered attention on his
wife."

    "Three weeks later, on June 14," wrote Mr.
Dao, "Sergeant Jones was killed by a roadside
bomb in Baghdad on his third tour in a war that
is not yet three years old. He was 25."

    Three times Sergeant Jones was sent to Iraq,
which tells you all you need to know about the
fairness and shared sacrifices of this war. If
you roll the dice enough times, they're
guaranteed to come up snake eyes.

    Sergeant Jones told his wife, Kelly, that he
had "a bad feeling" about heading back to Iraq
for a third combat tour. After his death, his
wife found a message that he had left for her
among his letters and journal entries.

    "Grieve little and move on," he wrote. "I
shall be looking over you. And you will hear me
from time to time on the gentle breeze that
sounds at night, and in the rustle of leaves."

    In addition to the more than 2,000 dead, an
additional 15,000 Americans have been wounded.
Some of these men and women have sacrificed one,
two and even three limbs. Some have been
permanently blinded and others permanently
paralyzed - some both. Some have been horribly
burned.

    For the Iraqis, the toll is beyond hideous.
Perhaps 30,000 dead, of which an estimated 10
percent have been children. The number of Iraqi
wounded is anybody's guess.

    This is what happens in war, which is why
wars should only be fought when there is utterly
and absolutely no alternative.

    So what's ahead, now that the giddiness in
Washington has been replaced by anxiety and the
public is turning against the war?

    Even Richard Nixon's cronies are crawling out
of the woodwork to urge the Bush gang to stop the
madness. In an article for Foreign Affairs
magazine, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird,
now 83, says the administration needs to come up
with a clearly defined exit strategy, and fast.

    Said Mr. Laird: "Getting out of a war is
still dicier than getting into one, as George W.
Bush can attest."

    But President Bush, who never gave the
country a legitimate reason for going to war, and
has never offered a coherent strategy for winning
the war, seems in no hurry to figure out a way to
exit the war.

    Soon after the Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday
that the American death toll in Iraq had reached
2,000, the president gave a speech in which he
said: "This war will require more sacrifice, more
time and more resolve. No one should
underestimate the difficulties ahead, nor should
they overlook the advantages we bring to this
fight."

    Thousands upon thousands are suffering and
dying in Iraq while, in Washington, incompetence
continues its macabre marathon dance with
incoherence.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/102705K.shtml