posted on September 24, 2004 05:19:40 AM new
Sept 23, 2004:
As of today, 1,037 American soldiers have died since the start of the Iraq war. A total of 114 U.S. soldiers were killed between the start of the war March 20, 2003, and President Bush's declaration of the end of major combat operations May 1, 2003. Since then, 678 U.S. soldiers have been killed by hostile fire.
posted on September 24, 2004 12:21:52 PM new
Iraq milestone
Well, John Kerry has now taken a position on whether we should have gone into Iraq. (No.) We must assume that that is his settled position, since he tried out all the variations of it before, so that he has now run out of options. Senator Kerry said, on Sept. 20, that knowing what we know now, we'd have done better not to have invaded.
I think he's right. If we could know that the war we are fighting would come to an end at midnight, we could do a balance sheet.
# Lost, 1,100 American lives and $100 billion.
# Achieved, (1) the deposition of Saddam Hussein; (2) the formal liberation of the Iraqi people from a despotic reign; (3) assurance that whatever program was fancied to build weapons of mass destruction was aborted; and (4) the respect of the world for having seen our duty and acted on it.
But the war will not be over at midnight. We do not know when it will be over and what we will then have accumulated in war dead and treasury depleted, and we do not know for sure what the scene in Iraq will be like when we are through.
A good subject for a seminar at the National War College would be: Was it a good idea to go to war in March 2003?
The affirmative will seek to carry the case by one simple, and hardly unpersuasive, proposition: If your intelligence informs you that an aggressive tyrant has in hand or prospectively in hand weapons of ultimate destructiveness, the United States has no alternative but to proceed by military intervention.
The negative would say: Unless there is reason to suspect an enemy timetable threatening action in days or weeks, one should deliberate alternatives to military intervention, including the possibility that the intelligence is defective.
That debate-seminar will be waged for decades, but not on the presidential election scene. President Bush can't acknowledge, while we are fighting day by day in Iraq, that the very reason for the military engagement is questionable. And Senator Kerry, having at last found a political roost, is not going to stray from it. So we are left with:
We shouldn't have.
We should have.
We need a program of withdrawal.
We have one. A graduated withdrawal is what we are effecting by staying the course.
Supporters of the war who don't have to engage in presidential debates with two-minute deadlines should feel free to acknowledge that if retrospective analysis is permitted, it is impossible to maintain that to have acted in March '03 was wise. But failure to justify the launching of the war does not discredit it. The French spring offensive in 1917 should never have been undertaken, but that didn't discredit the war. Field Marshal Montgomery's bridge-too-far air attack of September 1944 was disastrous, but didn't impair the Allied rationale.
President Bush is saddled with a war the evolution of which he can't retroactively reshape. His difficulty will lie in telling the public what should now be done. But this is a difficulty Kerry also has. Who has an answer to how to save the next American hostage from decapitation? The leverage Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has over U.S. thought and feeling is blindingly exploited by the simple sadism of the blindfolded hostage and the executioner's ax -- a viewer of the video reports that those screams will stay in memory forever. What is to be done about that?
# Why is it taking so long to try Saddam Hussein? He was captured in December. Do they really need a thousand witnesses in order to establish his guilt? Why not schedule his beheading to coincide with the next beheading of an American hostage?
There is nothing Kerry can do in the campaign to persuade a majority of American voters that the way to compensate for mistakes of the past generated by unreliable intelligence is to abandon an enterprise to which we are morally committed. Abandoning Vietnam is a historic deed we have yet to reconcile with U.S. idealism. We handle that problem by the expedient of not thinking about it. But Iraq is a mind-filling challenge that can't be made to disappear.
William F. Buckley, Jr. is editor-at-large of National Review, a Townhall.com member group.
WHERE WOULD YOU RATHER BE ACTIVELY FIGHTING TERRORISM, IN IRAQ OR ON AMERICAN STREETS
Hey, hey Ho, ho Kerry - sign the 1-8-0
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The person who has nothing for which he is willing
to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
--John Stuart Mill
posted on September 25, 2004 04:57:54 PM new
Don't forget to add the number of American civilian contractors that have been beheaded. We are up to 5 at least.
DICK CHENEY SUPPORTS MY RELATIONSHIP: People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to
Let's have a BBQ, Texas style, ROAST BUSH
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YOU CAN'T HAVE BULLSH** WITH OUT BUSH.
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posted on September 25, 2004 05:09:12 PM new
All those deaths were not from fighting either. Hundreds were from accidents...accidents that happen in the military all over the world...or while they're training.
The article mentions kerry taking a 'last' position. No one's stopping him from going back to one of his previous 8-9 positions on Iraq if he sees this 'last' position isn't getting his poll numbers up.
Besides....when he's in his own 'chest beating mode' he tells us he'll protect this Nation and he'll "hunt down the terrorists no matter what country their hiding in".....well kerrry - WAKE UP - they're in Iraq. So if you want us out of Iraq...then just how are you going to deal with all the AQ terrorists...and other groups of terrorists who have joined in this war against American?
Wishful thinking on my part, of course, as kerry can't answer any questions about what he'd do with groups like those in Fallujah. He avoids those questions like the plague.
"Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don´t have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president." - john kerry
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"These dizzying contradictions -- so glaring, so public, so frequent -- have gone beyond undermining anything Kerry can now say on Iraq. They have been transmuted into a character issue."
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"What kind of man, aspiring to the presidency, does not know his own mind about the most serious issue of our time?" - Charles Krauthammer
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posted on September 25, 2004 05:26:07 PM new
Yeager, don't forget some of the US soldiers committed suicide and some died from non-hostile gun shot wounds so not all of the deaths are combat related.
But you also have to consider that more of the seriously injured soldiers could have died if it were not for the advances in medicine over the years.
DICK CHENEY SUPPORTS MY RELATIONSHIP: People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to
Let's have a BBQ, Texas style, ROAST BUSH
------------------------------
YOU CAN'T HAVE BULLSH** WITH OUT BUSH.
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[ edited by logansdad on Sep 25, 2004 07:44 PM ]
No one's stopping him from going back to one of his previous 8-9 positions on Iraq if he sees this 'last' position isn't getting his poll numbers up.