After every professional sporting event, a box score is kept. The box score records how many runs and hits there were, how many shots were taken, how many assists there were, and such things as passed balls, and wild pitches. A box score on Bush’s war on terror as 2006 draws to a close would look something like this.
American sources report that there have been more than 600,000 Iraqi deaths since the war started. Bush contends that that figure is “not credible.” When it comes to credibility, Bush has major troubles of his own. The blood of those Iraqi deaths are on George Bush’s hands. If we lost that many people in this country, it would be the equivalent of losing the city of Seattle, Washington.
Since the war started, more than one million Iraqis have left their home country to move to neighboring Arab states. The passport office in Baghdad now stays open on weekends to handle the demand for travel documents. In effect, the Iraqi middle and professional classes have been wiped out, leaving only the very rich and the very poor to remain. George Bush alone is responsible for this phenomenon.
The coalition forces lost more than 300 men distributed among the British, the Spaniards, the Italians and the Poles. At the end of November, our losses stood at 2,900 dead with more than 20,000 wounded. If the war were to continue to the end of Bush’s term, which he says it will, there will be 5,000 killed and perhaps 35,000 to 40,000 wounded. The cost of the war so far has exceeded $350 billion. This is called “staying the course.” And George Bush is responsible for these deaths and this waste of our financial resources.
The figures in Bushes box score in his war on terror, as it relates to Iraq, has caused millions of people, particularly in the Arab countries, to conclude that George W. Bush is the world’s supreme terrorist. To believe that a president of the United States has fallen to such depths is unbelievable and unspeakable. At the same time, an objective observer would find it most difficult to disagree with this melancholy and dismal assessment.
E. E. CARR
December 4, 2006
Essay 221
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Kevin’s commentary: This was initially just a rider on the previous essay but I decided it was worth it’s own separate post since it had a title instead of a P.S.
While not the MOST unfortunate figure here, that $350 billion was the one that made me shake my head a little bit. We knew how much of a national drain the war would be from the start, and had accurate information about its cost the whole way. And yet still someone looked at it and said “yeah, keep this up.”
I think it’s a little extreme to call Bush “the world’s supreme terrorist” given that his intentions are not really to terrorize anyone (except potentially the terrorists themselves, I suppose), but presumably rather are just vengeance-driven/divinely inspired. A dumb reason to go to war, but far different from specifically attempting to spread panic among civilians. The fact that that’s is exactly what happened in a lot of the places we occupied was considered to be a nasty side-effect of the holy mission, I guess.