Grim and Grimmer
The Fourth of July is nearly upon us, and Americans are busy ramping up for the annual Independence Day holiday. Barbecue grills are being lit, picnic baskets are being packed, fireworks displays are being prepped, vacation trips are getting underway, and the big July 4th weekend sales extravaganzas are drawing shoppers like, well, ants to a picnic. Here at home, there’s a nationwide celebration going on.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, though, it’s a whole different story. Citizens of those two war-ravaged countries have precious little to celebrate this July 4th. Iraq in particular is a country in chaos, where an already grim situation continues to get grimmer by the day.
Sectarian violence and civil strife are escalating in Iraq. The situation there continues to deteriorate, despite what the official spinners and spokespersons say. While administration officials tout what they describe as a significant decline in lethal violence in Baghdad proper during the month of June, Iraqis are mourning many hundreds of their fellow citizens who’ve died violently in all parts of Iraq during the past week alone.
The latest Reuters FactBox report on security developments in Iraq over the weekend is a grim enough summary of that country’s descent into violent chaos just as it is. But that tally doesn’t even include this morning’s Washington Post report of yet more bombings taking place outside the Baghdad bubble. What was already grim just keeps getting grimmer in Iraq.
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As the WaPo article points out,
News services reported that 1,227 civilians died violently in June, a 36 percent decrease from May and the lowest monthly total since the Baghdad security plan started in mid-February. The figure was provided by the Iraqi ministries of interior, defense and health, according to the news services. Iraqi state television reported the same death toll.
A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Abdul Kareem Khalaf, said that he did not know whether the death toll was correct and that no one from the Interior Ministry was authorized to release fatality figures.
At least 101 U.S. soldiers were killed in June, the third-straight month in which American casualties reached more than 100 and the highest quarterly death toll since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, an independent Web site.
1,227 is a grim enough death toll for a single month, but given the uncertain situation on the ground and inside the Interior Ministry the actual Iraqi casualty count is sure to be even grimmer than that. The problem with trying to cite casualty figures in an active war zone is that the body count inevitably increases faster than the numbers can be tabulated.
Even with more accurate information coming from our own armed services, that sad calculus is just as true for American and coalition casualties as it is for Iraqi ones. The official U.S. casualty count stood at 101 as of June 29, but there are other casualties still in the process of being confirmed by the D.O.D. The unofficial count was actually 108 at that time. It’s even higher now.
These statistics are never static. According to the running totals maintained by ICCC at http://www.icasualties.org, there were 3,578 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq as of this weekend. The WaPo website count still put the total at 3,561 instead (3,965 including those killed in Afghanistan as well.) [Update: as of July 2, the ICCC online tally has been raised to 3,584 to include more troops who lost their lives in Iraq while this blog entry was posted.]
The numbers are grim, and they’re still getting grimmer. This is the third month in a row in which U.S. military fatalities in Iraq have exceeded the milestone number of 100. This is the third time in a month that we’ve reported on those ever-increasing casualty counts here on johnkerry.com, too. On June 4, we listed the 37 U.S. soldiers who had been killed in The Last 7 Days since the Memorial Day holiday:
When the deliberate mismanagement of our involvement in Iraq has led to such grim circumstances after 5 years of our troops risking all, one has to ask, what are we doing there? What are we accomplishing?
And just a week later on June 10, we noted the sad passing of another milestone, 3500:
Iraq is becoming one big field of numbers; 3500 Americans killed in action, untold thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the sectarian violence and millions of refugees that are fleeing the region. The problem with numbers that large is that they blur the focus and obscure the fact that each number is an individual tragedy, each loss a grief that will be borne by real families for the rest of their lives.
And now, at the start of a July 4th holiday in which Americans are celebrating their birth of our country while Iraqis are mourning the death of theirs, we’re reporting on grim milestones once again. And things just keep getting grimmer in Iraq, despite what the President said in his weekly radio address yesterday in which he also compared U.S. troops deployed abroad to the signers of the Declaration of Independence:
“We’re still at the beginning of this offensive, but we’re seeing some hopeful signs … We’re engaging the enemy, and killing or capturing hundreds.” Apparently we’re back to measuring success by enemy body counts again. But at least Mr. Bush didn’t try to claim that we’re making progress and that we’re turning the corner in Iraq again this time, too.
As the President continues selling his surge over the airwaves, his actions in Iraq are increasingly remniscent of something that another imperious head of state named George said about his own stubborn refusal to end an unpopular and unwinnable war abroad:
George III obstinately tried to keep Great Britain at war with the rebels in America, despite the opinions of his own ministers. Lord Gower and Lord Weymouth both resigned rather than suffer the indignity of being associated with the war. Lord North advised George III that his (North’s) opinion matched that of his ministerial colleagues, but stayed in office. Eventually, George gave up hope of subduing America by more armies. “It was a joke,” he said, “to think of keeping Pennsylvania”. There was no hope of ever recovering New England. But the King was determined “never to acknowledge the independence of the Americans, and to punish their contumacy by the indefinite prolongation of a war which promised to be eternal.”
Contrast those arrogant statements made by an earlier George at the dawn of American independence with the ones that Senator Kerry made in a speech he gave on the floor of the Senate on May 1 of this year:
We honor the lives lost in Iraq, not with words but with lives saved. We honor the lives lost in Iraq not with words and with the political partisanship here but with a policy that is right for them and for the region. We honor their sacrifice by creating a situation in the region where we protect America’s and the region’s interests at the same time and begin to recognize the degree to which our presence in Iraq is playing into the hands of the terrorists, is advancing the very cause we seek to fight, which is diminishing the ability of the United States to be able to leverage, not just the Middle East issues, but a host of other issues in the world.
I believe we need to change course, and it is only by changing course that we will honor their sacrifice, respect our interests, and bring our troops home with honor.
That is how we honor our troops. That is how Washington keeps its unspoken agreement with those who sign up to serve. You honor the memory of the more than 3500 who have given their lives, you honor the troops and their families by giving meaning and purpose to their mission. You honor them by getting the policy right.
At least Mr. Bush did acknowledge in his weekend radio address that “The fight in Iraq has been tough, and it will remain difficult.” He’s right about that. The fight in Iraq has been tough, and it will remain difficult. It has been grim, and it will continue to get grimmer—until we finally convince this administration that it’s time to finally get the policy right in Iraq, and to bring our troops home in time to celebrate next Independence Day with their loved ones here in America instead.
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http://www.petitiononline.com/JJ41385/petition.html
Bush has sacrificed the security of our homeland even more because of the ongoing war in Iraq. I have noticed this from the beginning. You can not walk into the middle of a fire pit with gasoline soaked on your clothes and not expect to get burnt. That in essence is what Bush has done. I am a 22 year old loyal Democrat, but even with party lines aside, things do look grim.
Doesn’t someone from the House initiate impeachment? What good would impeaching the incumbents do now? Why not focus on electing someone in 2008 dedicated to ending the Iraq War and U.S. military aggression? What changes need to take place in Congress to stop U.S. tax dollar spending in Iraq and on warmongering? Should Cheryl Osimo be drafted to organize war protest in Golden Gate Park for the Summer of Love 40th anniversary? How could the end to the Vietnam War be duplicated? U.S. Armed Forces are volunteers but taxation without representation should not finance unwanted war. Choose your ribbon of support for massive protest attendance! Pink, red, brown upside down or yellow! The only massive protests in 2006 required wearing white to support sanctuary for illegal immigrants and their power to shut down the U.S. economy. Where is the muscle and will of U.S. by the people for the people government?
There is no place on the Senator’s home page to email him an opinion. I am visiting his website to send him my comments (I’m a Mass. resident), and this feature is conspicuously absent. A goal for the near term, which seems quite attainable, would be for the Senator to offer to listen to the people he represents. (even Kennedy has this!).
Things are going badly in Iraq because this president’s priorities are all in the wrong places. He is not focusing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Instead he concentrated on commuting the prison sentence of I. Scooter Libby, a convicted felon. This president clearly doesn’t care about what the American people think of the unpopular war in Iraq or his blatant disregard for the rule of law.
Dan,
At the lower right-hand corner of every page on this website is a ‘Contact Us’ link that takes you to directly to this information:
John Kerry for Senate
129 Portland St.
Suite 500
Boston, MA 02114-2014
202-464-2136
Also, in multiple locations on every page of the Senator’s official web site at http://kerry.senate.gov there are addresses and phone numbers for all his offices, plus additional ‘Contact’ links that take you to a page listing the same office information along with a direct send-email link as well.
Rick, thanks for another great post. So sad, isn’t it? I don’t know if Bush is totally out of touch or if he just doesn’t give a damn what the country thinks. Meanwhile, people are dying.
Dan, wow. You can’t find a way to talk to JK? He’s the only Senator I know who blogs pretty regularly at kos and huffpo (and replies to comments), and his office information is, as Otter noted above, pretty easy to find. He was at bluemassgroup not long ago. He’s not too hard to find if you want to ask him something. I hope you get your question to him somehow, because he does listen.
Probus, the Libby thing is just plain pitiful. I just saw on CNN that 80% of the public doesn’t agree with Bush’s commutation of Scooter’s jail sentence.
Kerry listens. Bush, not so much.
Grim is as Grim Gets. President Grim W Bush has no interest in what you think, or anyone in your country or in the world around. This was evident back at the very beginning, when 3 world democracies joined forces to invade 2 countries and executed a coup of the ruling party in each. No one disputes that the ruling parties in each of these countries was deserving of being upended into a pile of dung.
The invasion of Afghanistan has always roused a different view from our invasion of Iraq. For the purpose of my response to this thread, I will concentrate on Iraq.
The wholly trinity of GrimW in the centre, Tony the bLair on the left and little Johnny HuffnPuff Howard on the right took it upon themselves to rid the world of ...umm… people who want to kill us and ...umm… people who don’t pray right. The majority of British were extremely angry with their PM about ignoring their wishes. The majority of Australians demanded that we did not join forces with Britain and America to invade Iraq. Our PM chose to ignore the will of the people too.
So, the invasion had little to do with WMDs which all 3 leaders knew were most likely non existent. And it had little to do with forcing democracy on another country when our leaders had declared democracy in the 3 invading nations to be null and void. The people were to be ignored and we slipped, on a whisper, into autocratic rule. Tony bLair has gone. The British people are trying to regain democracy. HuffnPuff Howard will very soon be gone and we will restore democracy here. But GrimW has over a year and a half to wreak even more havoc on the world.
The fear, death and destruction of Iraqi citizens including its children fills me with such sadness that I have to look for the good. And I wonder how we let our democracies go, with barely a whimper.
Iraq is now a democracy. We’ve forced democracy upon them. They’ve had a few elections now. Isn’t that wonderful? We gave them the government that we allow them to have. We did not trust them to choose the right person or people so most of the voting in Iraq was engineered. If the current American administration knows anything, it’s how to get their chosen people to the top of the democratic pile. And the Iraqis are not so dumb that they don’t know that. They know it. They reject it. And they’ve turned on each other because of it.
To see what happens when a democracy chooses the wrong people we only need look at the Palestinian elections when Hamas won overwhelmingly. So, at the beck and call of GrimW all aid from across the world was stopped and the Palestinians were starved until the recent break between the two Palestinian sides. The other side was the one favoured by the US who said, we give aid to this side. Not the side democratically chosen by its people.
So, I don’t know when our democracies became autocracies but we can never call our countries democratic until we honour the choices of the people within each democratic nation and not punish them when they choose our enemy instead of our friend to be their ruling party. That is their right if they are a true democracy.
And now, through this grim invasion and the grimmer statistics we are coming up with every day, I wonder about the numbers of American and Iraqi injured. I wonder about the lifetime of care those people need and will need for many years. Are the invaders responsible for providing ongoing lifetime medical, physical and psychiatric care in Iraq as well as at home? I hope we are. We owe the Iraqis and our militaries more than this.
More soldiers survive their injuries than ever before. Is this a good thing? Or not? If it were one of my boys - for some injuries - for a negligible life quality - for my boy, I’d say not.
We seem not to care what the World thinks of us. All too often I read that we should not care what the World thinks of us. Now apply that to a drop out of society? Are we then not drop outs of World Opinon? Now read in what ways that might manifest itself? We MUST care what the World thinks of us just as we MUST care what our family and friends think of us?
On the subject of Suicide Bombers for example?
Some miss the point that suicide bombers happen to be Muslims mostly but not all and that in history they have been Christians only they had no bombs but gave of their bodies to the Roman Lions. Japanese were also suiciders as they thought it honorable when outnumbered to throw themselves on the pyre. I have also known of Indian wives having to be restrained from suicide in throwing themselves on their husbands funeral pyre rather than live without them. The IRA were terrorists in my London when I was a serving soldier there and many soldiers died in bomb attacks but usually the bomber did NOT die. Did they have too good a life to want to do ‘end it all’ for their cause? We have to wonder why some feel life so desperate to go out in such a drastic way. Of course this form of attack is usually done in a power struggle. Bodies against tanks and drones. Bombers against gunship helicopters and missiles as in Palestine. Why? Don’t give me the old chestnut “they think they go to Muslim heaven”. No one with a half decent life will want to end it prematurely. There was a case of a beautiful Palestinian Doctor who became a bomber after her Lawyer brother was shot dead by Israeli soldiers upon answering a knock at the door. The London Muslim bombers gave their lives but the recent ones did not seem so dedicated. A bit more amateurish. It will be difficult to recruit bombers in affluent communities. More to make a point it seemed? What WE also have to consider is how we would feel if we were downtrodden, living in a dustbowl without decent homes and lives and if our nation was occupied and invaded and our neighbors and family were being killed as collateral or even as freedom fighters against collaboration with the invaders? Would we in a reversal of circumstances give our lives up to make a difference just like the Muslims who think the Western Powers should leave. Or the Muslims who think we are biased in favor of Israeli brutality and dominance in Gaza? Would we be upset enough to form groups like the Free French did in Paris and be willing to kill our own people/collaborators?
I come from the Island of Guernsey and they were not very kind to the Guernsey collaborators after the Germans left. We need an ability to place the shoe on the other foot occasionally? I don’t think that “Masters of the Universe” think like that hardly at all. Neither does the average ‘playground bully’ as it happens? We of course don’t want to even consider that the World will see a nation always at war?Not content with invading two nations we talk incessantly of invading several more? Do we seem like the Roman Empire do you think? Do we as a nation either not SEE or not care what others think of us? How would we evaluate a ‘person’ who cared not what his/her peers thought of them? Apply that to being a World Citizen and how do we look then? Finally, what if WE were invaded by an ‘alien force’ mightier that us. Would WE start counting our friends? How could ‘Aliens’ affect our relationship with Mexico? Would we STILL want a wall to keep them out, or indeed would it be an encumbrance to ‘our’ escape. Are we then not VERY narrow minded in our philosophies? We might yet one day be facing a crisis from an enemy unknown and WE would be the first target. We might be glad of those 12 million disposable illegal’s to get the Alien attention whilst we skip away in our Lear Jets and our flotilla of pleasure boats. Just like New Orleans, some don’t have the means of escape in a crisis. Some of us are just required to be life’s ‘fallguys’. They also don’t lose sleep over any of this?
Patrick, you have made some excellent points here and have given me a new reality. That’s what we have done since 9/11. We have trained our children to be our suicide bombers; to kill or be killed. We train them to go into countries where there is no uniform worn and no prior study of the culture, religion or language.
The suicide bomber inevitably is killed. Our children, and the children of Iraq and Afghanistan are the casualties. And all the while we wonder in awe that a child is so willing to die for a higher cause.
This is exactly what we are doing. Like al Qaeda, we train and motivate to hate so that killing will be easier on the psyche. They are our suicide bombers. How dare we? There are degrees of survival of those who come home. It would be an almost safe bet that all survivors will be changed in some ways across the entire spectrum of good social, spiritual, physical and psychological health.
Thanks Patrick