Mr. Bush's War

Bad to Worse

While the Bush team continues to claim that things are going well in Iraq, Bush himself did slip up this week and admit that he feared for American lives in Iraq.

As well he should. We continue to lose American soldiers and contractors there at a very regular pace even though this press is getting a little bored with reporting on it. Yesterday, three more were killed but you wouldn’t hear much about it if you turned on the TV news.

But American deaths are only part of the bloody costs of the war. What Bush left out of the equation was the number of Iraqis killed by the chaos that has ensued since Iraq was “liberated”. The Iraqi Interior Minister is putting that number at 12,000. 12,000 lives that have been sacrificed because of lack of patience and forethought.

Can Bush sit down with the families of those killed and tell them it was worth it to do it his way?

And this may just be the beginning of the chaos. All of these 12,000 have been killed in ambushes and car bombs and gunfire.

Now it has been discovered that weapons equipment that could be used for making long-range missiles or even bio- or chemical weapons have gone missing from 109 different sites around Iraq. U.N. inspectors, who have been banned by the U.S. from retuning to Iraq, discovered this using satellite imagery.

With all the concern for “weapons of mass destruction” this equipment has never been secured. Who knows now where it will show up and how many more lives it will add to the tally.