It's a Number
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Columnist
Tuesday 25 March 2008
You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's
life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. You can find them in churches
and schools and newspapers and legislatures and congress. That's their business.
They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood.
These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble
dead. Hmmmm. But what do the dead say?
- Dalton Trumbo, "Johnny Got His Gun"
White House press secretary Tony Snow, the third man to hold that post in the
Bush administration since 2001, began the June 15, 2006, noon press briefing
with a few prepared remarks before opening the floor to questions from the assembled
crowd of reporters. The first to speak noted, "American deaths in Iraq
have reached 2,500," before asking, "Is there any response or reaction
from the president on that?"
"It's a number," replied Snow, "and every time there's one of
these 500 benchmarks people want something."
As of that June day in 2006, the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq
had reached "one of these 500 benchmarks" for a fifth time since the
2003 invasion. Snow's unabashed dismissal of the grim reality that number represented
was as vile as it was predictable, a perfect illustration of the administration's
cold indifference and demented priorities. It's a number. It's a benchmark.
People want something. Next question.
On Monday, that benchmark was reached for an eighth time. Four US soldiers
were killed late Sunday when their vehicle was bombed in south Baghdad, bringing
the total number of American troops lost in Iraq to 4,000. It's a number. It's
a benchmark. People want something. Next question.
Last year's military escalation in Iraq was touted by the Bush administration
as a can't-fail solution to the carnage and chaos of a ferocious sectarian civil
war they refused to acknowledge even existed. It was a tough sell from the beginning,
or so it seemed back then, as every poll of public opinion on Iraq and all things
Bush said a large majority of Americans believed attacking Iraq was a comprehensively
bad idea, and the occupation of Iraq needed to end soon so the troops may come
home. Those same polls, when crunched in the proper fashion, also had an even
larger majority of Americans coming to the conclusion George W. Bush was more
popular than contracting shingles while drowning in a vat of lemon juice, but
just barely.
Clearly, there was branding to be done if Bush's legacy and signature foreign
policy program were to be salvaged. Thus, those same linguistic wizards from
the White House who came up with the "Clear Skies Initiative" label
to disguise both the comprehensive deregulation of environmental protections
and the carnival of unbridled pollution it produced; those same wizards who
duped everyone including Teddy Kennedy into believing "No Child Left Behind"
was anything other than a bonfire lit beneath public education standards; those
same wizards who deployed comments like "plastic sheeting and duct tape"
and "Islamofascist" and "Bring 'em on" to make sure everyone
was afraid, aggressive and ignorant in equal measure; those same wizards who
convinced Americans things like privacy and liberty and rights and the Constitution
were quaint and dangerous anachronisms we need to abandon before the terrorists
use them to destroy America; those same wizards were also able to gloss over
the escalation of a hopeless war with another vacant, vapid and now-ubiquitous
euphemism known as "The Surge."
"The Surge" was going to lead us out of Iraq, at first, kinda, until
"The Surge" became the main argument for why we had to stay in Iraq
for now, until a date to be determined later, or maybe not for another hundred
years, give or take, according to a war hero who survived unimaginable torture
so he could become the GOP's presidential standard-bearer and be for the torture
of anyone, anywhere, under any circumstances and in the name of America, before
he was against it, as far as anyone knows, or something.
"The Surge" was keeping American soldiers safe, sort of, except for
those four American soldiers who died on Monday, except for those 600 American
soldiers who died during "The Surge," and even though "The Surge"
was supposed to make it harder for American soldiers to die, even though "The
Surge" began as a finite thing but became an indefinite action that smells
like another reason to stay in Iraq forever, none of that matters because the
consensus seems to be "The Surge" is good and so America is winning
and all is right with the world.
Leave off the fact that a married couple and their three sons died when either a rocket or a mortar hit their central Baghdad home, that two people died and seven were wounded by mortars in central Baghdad, that another person died in an attack in eastern Baghdad, that six dead bodies were discovered all across Baghdad, that four Iraqi soldiers were killed while on patrol near Kirkuk, that gunmen killed a police lieutenant and wounded two other police officers in central Baquba, that a suicide car bomber killed six or more people and wounded ten in northwestern Baghdad, that a suicide truck bomber attacked an Iraqi army base and killed 13 soldiers while wounding 42 others in Mosul, that a suicide car bomber killed one soldier and wounded eight others in Mosul, that gunmen killed seven people and wounded 16 others in southern Baghdad, that a roadside bomb wounded two people in central Baghdad, that a Katyusha rocket was fired into the Green Zone, killed five people and wounde
d eight in eastern Baghdad, that gunmen murdered Colonel Akram Awad al-Omairi, commander of a rapid reaction unit outside his home in the town of Abu Saida, and that a suicide car bomb killed five people and wounded 11 north of Baghdad.
That was Sunday.
Four more American soldiers were killed in Iraq. Four thousand Americans have
died in Iraq since that first bright idea for invasion and occupation was realized
in 2003. The press won't touch the subject, because they are just as much to
blame as anyone, and there are actually still a few who try to argue it was
a bully idea to butcher 4,000 American volunteers and nobody knows how many
others in the process, but that's only on Fox News. The politicians of both
parties won't touch this, except to give speeches from a distance, because most
of them have blood on their hands. The Bush administration just wants us to
hear their rosy "any-day-now" balderdash and nothing else, because
they have a job to do that has nothing to do with how you feel or where you
stand or who you love.
It's a number. It's a benchmark. People want something. Next question.
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know" and "The Greatest Sedition Is Silence." His newest book, "House of Ill Repute: Reflections on War, Lies, and America's Ravaged Reputation," is now available from PoliPointPress.
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