Yesterday, the Bully Boy gave yet another laughable radio address where he declared that "powerful blows" were being struck.
He didn't mean US fatalities.
He might just as well have.
To repeat, on December 31st, the count reached 3000. 700 more deaths have been reported since then.
The only thing escalating in Bully Boy's escalation has been the number of the dead.
Thursday another mark loomed. 4,000 dead. That mark was reached on Friday. As Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!) reported Friday, "In Iraq, the coalition death toll has now topped four thousand. The vast majority are American, with thirty-seven hundred and two U.S. troops killed. Forty-four U.S. service members have died this month."
Last week also saw Jonathan Weisman and Karen DeYoung (Washington Post) report that the White House was trying to cut off access to Gen. David Petreaus' long promised, heavily hyped, September 15th report to Congress that would instead have sections delivered by the Secretaries of State and Defense and Petreaus would testify in closed session to Congress. The administration wanted to shut the public out of the debate. Under pressure from unusually feisty Democrats, the White House backed down on that effort.
The White House also began making noises (publicly and through selective leaks) that their might be a cut in the number of US troops on the ground in Iraq. As Steven Lee Myers and Thom Shanker (New York Times) reported yesterday, "One administration official made it clear that the goal of the planned announcement was to counter public pressure for a more rapid reduction and to try to win support for a plan that could keep American involvement in Iraq on 'a sustainable footing' as least through the end of the Bush presidency." Somke and mirrors.
Tuesday saw a bombing in northern Iraq where the fatalities were over 250 and some figures reported the death toll was as high as 500. Nouri al-Maliki who, last summer, pledged $35 million to Lebanon offered his own citizens a paltry $1600 to surviving families for each family member they lost. Just Foreign Policy's count for the number of Iraqis who have died in the illegal war since it began now stands at 1,012, 979.
Nouri al-Maliki's also shut out the Sunni's in his newfound 'alliance' thereby trashing the White House's own 'benchmarks' ('benchmark' two and sixteen for those keeping score at home). In other words, 'progress' in Iraq is the same as it was last week, and the week before, and the week before that, and the week before . . .
Democrats in Congress better get serious about ending the illegal war. Voters are not going to see waiting until a few months (or, in Bully Boy's case, a few weeks) before the November 2008 elections as getting serious. Democrats were elected to end the illegal war.
If they can't or won't get serious on that issue, they will deserve any and all fallout they get.
As Tina Richards, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Military Families Speak Out point out: Funding the war is killing the troops. Congress can end the illegal war anytime they decide they want to and most Americans have already caught on. The same way they've caught on to Operation Happy Talk: CNN reported last week that a recent poll found 53% of Americans expect Petreaus's "military assement of the situation in Iraq will try to make it sound better than it actually is."
