When I spoke of our nation’s great sacrifice of 2,000 men and women soldiers, not too long ago, I titled the article Grimm Reminder, to remind my fellow country folk that while we live our lifestyles, a war was being waged in our name. While we ate fine dinners at some restaurant chain and slept in our warm comfy beds, our soldiers were off in a foreign land, dying for a President’s cause. I had hoped that the numerous reporting of 2,000 combat related fatalities would shake Americans up a bit, to make them see that every one of those lives was comparable to our own. Most often a young man, not even drinking age, from a background of the working class. Every face a life, a living, breathing, actual person with hopes, dreams, flaws, talents, sins and good deeds. Somehow my fellow country folk in the middle and on the right of the political spectrum were not convinced. So the war raged on, and the number doubled.
On Easter Sunday, one of this so-called Christian nation’s most devout and spiritually holy holidays was dealt a great blow by the divine powers that be. This day of love, hope and spiritual enlightenment delivered our great nation its 4000th combat related death in the Iraq War. This does not, by the way, include “accidents†or many others wounded who died as a result of combat wounds, which is a source of great controversy to the soldier’s families. Just the same, it’s politically manipulated and dreadful figure arrived.
The Iraq War now rivals the Philippine-American War, one of the longest and most unpopular conflicts in American History. The war for the archipelago cost the U.S. fatalities that vary from 2,000 to 7,000 depending on, the politics of its time as much as reality. Still, many estimate the battle to bring democracy and capitalism to the islands cost this nation between 4,000-5,000 soldiers, before ultimately creating an unstable state almost 40 years later. Today, our political and military efforts have not quelled the continuous civil war that was first touched off by our very presence in the Philippines. Yet 100 years later, it can be modestly claimed a success. A people who wished to be free by their own hands yet were somehow freed by the pragmatic hands of Uncle Sam are expected to be grateful and appreciative of our sacrifice, even if we have to kill 100,000 of you to make you thankful. It was a very similar and misguided campaign to our present war in Iraq.
“I am not afraid, and am always ready to do my duty, but I would like some one to tell me what we are fighting for.”–Arthur H. Vickers, Sergeant in the First Nebraska Regiment
The Iraq War is now longer than our involvement in both World Wars and is more expensive than the Vietnam conflict, even adjusted for inflation. However a few statistics waved in the air combined with a virtual blackout by the entertainment major media and you have the TRUE success of “The Surgeâ€. There is success in Iraq as a direct result of the Surge, just as if a drug addict was being followed around all the time by a rich uncle who rewards sobriety. However there is no simple explanation why things are sliding backwards other than the fact that we failed, as a nation, to capture Iraq’s political heart nor seek to truly understand it.