Blood money

What a heinous, shameful bunch of people we have leading this country, making their blood-smeared war profits off the backs of our soldiers, tossing them in offhand wads at a cynically manufactured enemy, then discarding them like useless, broken tools.

Our soldiers. Our children. Our loved ones. Our future.

And because our fellow Americans are destroyed in such small numbers – two today, none tomorrow, four the next day – and because they hide them away in flag-covered boxes and scabrous, hellish hotels -- we hardly know the extent of the waste.

Barak Obama was subjected to the baying hounds of shining righteousness recently for forgetting himself and calling the war in Iraq what it is – a waste of precious lives.

“... we ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

He apologized for his “gaffe.” It seems that even after four years of carnage, Americans aren’t ready to face the monstrous facts yet. But Obama spoke the simple truth.

The war in Iraq is a war of profit. A cynical, eyes-wide-open criminal war cheerfully supported by the richest and most powerful people in America for no better reason than by waging it, they are getting richer and more powerful.

We’ve forgotten, as we live our blank-eyed Wal-Mart lives, lulled by big-screen TVs and Carl’s Jr., frightened like gullible children by tales of the bogeyman, that we are the People of America, and this country belongs to us, not to those bloated, croaking toads and dark ravens of avarice who’ve cheated their way into power, the ones who call themselves our leaders. The ones who are sending the most patriotic and dedicated among us to die terrible deaths or be maimed and broken forever.

We have the power to end this war, this terrible waste of lives, of national treasure, of the very future of our democracy. But the vast majority of us remain silent. Perhaps when our own sons and daughters, our own husbands and wives, brothers and sisters are destroyed for the sake of Halliburton profits and George W. Bush’s dark “legacy,” perhaps then we’ll speak.

But it will be too late.