Bush Carnage

Bush Carnage, originally uploaded by Wazdat!.

Like a cab horse with blinders on

Like a cab horse with blinders on, Bush continued to assume in his speech at Fort Bragg, that his ideological conclusions about lraq can serve as fact. He gave us all, - the same old same old. "9-11 9-11", "Freedom on the march! Freedom on the march! ". Unfortunately, and unconscionably for our troops, he offered very little evidence to back them up.

He was forced to acknowledge that the heavy carnage and loss suffered by the people of Iraq and the troops. After all, he saw it on TV! He even acknowledged that the American people ask themselves if the war is worth it.

What he didn't tell us is that the violence is getting worse.

ln the span of 2 months, April and May, more than 270 bombings occurred. And the method of bombing has gotten deadlier. In May 381 people were killed in "multiple casualty" bombings. This is from the Brookings Institution's Iraq Index And the Iraqi allies aren't doing much better. The tally of cops and soldiers killed reached 296 in June 3 times more than in either January or February. "Acts of War" death estimates have risen as well according to Brookings.

This year there were 25% more troop fatalities and twice as many insurgent attacks per day as there were in the preceding year.

Bush spoke about how "We are improving roads and schools and health clinics and working to improve basic services like sanitation, electricity and water.” after saying that progress has been "uneven".

Yes, it has been uneven, with new schools being built, enrollment increasing, new healthcare centers.

But electricity is barely above pre-war levels. On the average, lraqis have electricity for only 12 hours a day. Ninety six percent of urban lraqis are very unhappy about this. Twenty percent still don't have water.

The most fantasy-ridden statement Bush could've made was:


"They failed to break our coalition and force a mass withdrawal by our allies. They failed to incite an lraqi civil war."
Let's see...Spain took out it's 1,300 soldiers in April last year, courtesy of the bombing in Madrid. Honduras - 370 went home. The Philippines took away 51 troops after a hostage crisis. Ukraine will finish withdrawing its troops by the end of the year. 1,650 men, close to the amount that the US has lost. The Netherlands and Italy are leaving as well. So are Bulgaria's 450 troops, and Poland, the number 3 in Iraq after Britain, only backed off of a full withdrawal because of the Iraqi elections, and a talk with Condi. Still, their next rotation will have 200 fewer soldiers.

As for a civil war? Some people say that the insurgency is already a civil war. Herein we discover the lie of Iraqi "sovereignty.” How can it not be a civil war if the insurgents are fighting the armed forces of a "sovereign" Iraqi government? According to the Times of London, an Iraqi police colonel says that Sunnis are fighting Shia. Yet Bush says there is no civil war. That can only be true if one side or the other is merely part of occupying foreign power. A power say like - the United States.

Quite serendipitously, Dubya did luck out on the terrorism question. You see, there were no terrorists in Iraq before the war. Thanks to the neocon Laurel and Hardy act, if there aren't any terrorists there yet, there will be! For the record, Saddam denied bin Laden's request to establish training camps.

For that matter, most of the insurgents are not foreigners. They only number about 1,000. There are about 16,000 insurgents fighting. In Fallujah, in 2004, Marines counted only 2% of the detainees as foreigners. Now Brookings says 70% of the bombers came from Saudi Arabia, but even so, this doesn't mean that they are coming over here soon.

Still, there is the fact that al Qaeda has gotten much stronger in Iraq after the invasion. Since the invasion, a heretofore tenuous connection between al Qaeda and Zarqawi was strengthened and "al Qaeda in Iraq" was born.

Bush was being disingenuous to men who were being sent into danger, on account of his insincere stupidity.


Iraqi Insurgency

Coalition Of The Willing

Military Occupation

Reconstruction

Iraq Index as of 7/5/2005