The first real rain of the season is falling just outside my open window as I write this. The sky is barely light. When I let the dog out a half-hour ago, it was still wholly dark, and as soon as I opened the door for him, I heard for myself what I’d only suspected as I tossed and turned through the night – the sound of rain. And ...

... the trees singing in it.

After the very long, very dry summer, broken only by a brief shower here and there, it seems to me that the trees must rejoice in the autumn rain. They get a thorough rinsing, a good soaking; all the summer’s dust and rising auto exhaust from the valley that comes to cling, off it all goes. The red-tail hawk’s nest on the snag, which I can only see when the nearer broadleaf trees are bare, is wet, dripping, abandoned until spring.

The sky lightens, and now I see that the air is filled with mist, the treetops shredding clouds. A bird, tough little fellow that he is, sings to the morning in the spent climbing roses. And, as I knew would happen, the rain and the breeze have stripped the sweet gum tree just outside the window of most of its flaming scarlet leaves. For my friend Mike, I’ll have to take a photo of the pool of blood they resemble now, lying at its base.

This chilly stretch of days before the winter solstice, when the light grows shorter and shorter, the nights longer and longer, is my time, my favorite time of the year. Soon, there will be fires in the woodstove – I know, because only yesterday the two cords of almond stovelengths I bought to warm us through the winter arrived, clean and dry and heavy, a huge pile that needs stacking at the bottom of my driveway. It rained because the wood came. It rained because we hadn’t stacked and covered it yet. When we do, and it dries off, there will be fragrant, cozy fires to back up to as winter looms.

The rain crackles now, ebbing away, and a new sound rises up the slope from the base of the evergreens – the sound of water, rushing and boiling down the irrigation district ditch in the crease of the hillside. It’s a soft roar, carrying the detritus of summer away.

The mist thickens into fog, and I smile.

The “mystery” of whether the U.S. uses the notorious torture technique known as “waterboarding” is no mystery.

Vice President Dick Cheney says we do, though not in so many words. He's so coy.

Torture is a technique of desperation and cruelty, used by cruel and desperate people the world over for countless centuries. Here in America, prior to Sept. 11, we thought we’d risen above such base brutality. For one thing, it's stupid. Torture rarely, if ever, results in actual hard intelligence – the person being tortured will tell his inquisitors just about anything they want to hear just to get them to stop hurting him.

As a way to get accurate, actionable information, torture of any kind is simply unreliable and a waste of time.

And yet ... in spite of the president’s and vice president’s protests to the contrary, the U.S. now tortures captives.

“Waterboarding” is just one of many techniques.

This is desperation. Faced with failed policies abroad and at home, with a war in Iraq that is – to put it very gently -- a fiasco, the Bush administration has moved past intelligent intelligence gathering to the low, brutish methods once reserved for witch-hunters and the Inquisition, hoping to find something – anything – that will justify taking America to war against a weak nation, slaughtering thousands and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars.

President George Washington, after having captured British troops, carefully and concisely told his officers and men not to mistreat the captives, in spite of the fact that the British threw gravely wounded and untreated American prisoners into jail with common criminals. It was a matter of principle; Washington didn’t want Americans to stoop so low.

President George W. Bush isn’t concerned with such issues.

Last week, Vice President Dick Cheney agreed with a radio interviewer’s assertion that “a dunk in the water is a no-brainer if it can save lives," though he hasn’t since explained exactly what he meant by “a dunk.” Surely the administration isn’t providing detainees with vacations to Club Med.

So perhaps Cheney meant a walk off the plank? Or someone’s head forced into a toilet until he talks?

Cheney won’t say, so it’s a short leap of the imagination to waterboarding. Such “dunking” -- and other forms of torture -- is un-American, the kind of mindless brutality that no civilized nation, certainly no democracy, should be undertaking. It shames all Americans and puts all of us at risk of the same treatment by our enemies, particularly those of us who serve in the military.

That, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, is a slam-dunk.

Update: Glenn Greenwald has an excellent and informative post up about our accepted policy of torture under the Bush administration. Definitely recommended reading.

“If we leave, then they will come after us.”

Let me get this straight, George. We send our soldiers – our kids, our dads and moms, our brothers and sisters, etc. over to Iraq so they can be targets for the terrorists. For us. In our places. If we bring them home, then the terrorists will just come over here. They’ll just pack their suitcases, catch the next flight over.

You know, I’m no innocent. I don’t believe for a second that dedicated, single-minded terrorists of many types and flavors (and Muslim jihadists are just one of them) might NOT one day wreak destruction on American soil again.

The world is what the world is. Terrorism is nothing new. It’s a horror, an attack visited by the oppressed and ultra-righteous against those they see as their unrighteous oppressors. That holds true whether the terrorists are Muslim jihadists, Basque freedom fighters, members of the Irish Republican Army, the old Bader Meinhof or dammit, Timothy McVeigh.

Terrorism didn’t suddenly wink into being with Sept. 11. Pretending we’re dealing with terrorism over there so we don’t have to deal with it here is naïve. No, scratch that. It’s criminally stupid.

***

That was the post I’d started working on last night.

Then, just before I toddled off to bed, I saw the story in which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s architect of death and destruction in Iraq, tells critics of the war to “back off.”

This morning, the first thing I see in the headlines is that 43 people, including 23 Iraqi police officers, were killed during house-to-house fighting near Baghdad while I slept. The U.S. is claiming that 18 insurgents were killed too, but who knows, really.

Then I read about the Republican attack, initiated by Rush Limbaugh, on Parkinson’s sufferer Michael J. Fox for appearing in a political ad urging voters to vote for candidates that support stem-cell research in the hope it may someday help or even cure people with terrible, debilitating and often, ultimately fatal diseases and injuries.

Finally, I read that the Replicans are shrieking about the New Jersey Supreme Court ruling yesterday that allows civil unions for same-sex couples so they can share the rights enjoyed by married couples. Somehow, this benign ruling besmirches the sanctity of marriage.

Yet all these couples are asking for is the right to be legally considered “family” by the law, so should one or the other fall ill or die, they can make medical decisions on behalf of one another. They want the right that says the person dying can make sure his or her financial assets and property go to the loved partner, and they want the right to enjoy the same tax breaks heterosexual couples enjoy – whether they were legally joined by civil union (like I was) or by some pompous, bloviating, self-righteous God-person in a church.

No one is trying to destroy heterosexual marriage or deny heterosexuals the right to be married under their personal beliefs, have children and raise them however they wish. Sheesh.

Yet somehow, this non-issue is trumpeted by the self-righteous as Satan’s work on Earth.

Here’s something that’s niggled at me for a long, long time. How can people like George W. Bush (who signed legislation banning most stem-cell research) -- pro-life people – in the same breath cheerlead and support the useless deaths of thousands of U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands Iraqis?

It just doesn’t play. There’s a huge disconnect. Pro-lifers will protect blasocysts frozen in Petri dishes from being used for stem-cell research – which has the potential to save millions of lives in the future -- but enthusiastically send 18-year-olds, who have their whole lives before them, to Iraq to risk being killed for nothing more than George W. Bush’s frickin’ ego.

Because that’s what it comes down to. Our troops in Iraq are not making us safer here at home. According to the key judgements of the National Intelligence Estimate, released in part in September, our presence in Iraq is making us less safe. The war in Iraq has nothing to do with -- has never had anything to do with -- the "war on terror."

We're making moderate Muslims into extremists as we murder their sons, wives, children, husbands and families, and jeez, who can blame them? Turn the tables, and we'd be doing much the same thing. Al Qaeda didn’t exist in Iraq before we overthrew Iraq’s government, then continued killing people and looting and destroying the country as occupiers – and turning a blind eye to the sectarian divisions which had existed there for centuries.

Saddam kept a tight lid on sectarian clashes in Iraq by imposing a secular government -- and killing anyone who opposed him. Bad guy, sure. But when we toppled him, then stood by as the populace exploded around us, we created the perfect conditions for terrorists, insurgencies, sectarian violence and civil unrest. We’re responsible now for the deaths of thousands more Iraqis in the nearly four years since Shock and Awe than Saddam was in 24 years of rule as a tyrant and dictator.

We are standing up to our hips in our own shit right now. Bush is telling us, with his fingers crossed behind his back, that no, no – that’s not shit you’re smelling, and even if it is, it’s not ours. In the meantime, he’s forcing our sons, daughters, husbands, brothers and sisters to take the bullet for us even as he screeches holy righteousness about smears on a Petri dish and the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy in its earliest stage – before the blasocyst becomes a person, grows up and is sent off to die as cannon fodder for his unholy wars.

And yes, I know we have an all-volunteer military. But once they sign the dotted line, they have no choice but to fight, whether the war is legal or not.

This is madness. We have allowed lunatics to take control of our country. And why? Because America was wetting itself with fear after 9/11. These madmen – our fellow Americans -- saw the opportunity to capitalize on it and make a mint for themselves and for others of their ilk.

Sept. 11 was a spectacular attack in terms of audacity, scale and numbers killed, but more, it was incredibly successful. For the last five years, America has been completely cowed and terrorized. Osama, who hasn’t had to lift a finger since that morning, just has to be completely satisfied with the results our leaders have given him. In fact, they took up the reins and drove that terrorism horse right on home.

Gotta stop it, folks. All of it.

Please vote on Nov. 7. Mine will be against anyone who supports the war in Iraq, supporting George’s ego by sending our sons and daughters to die violently for us by proxy while doing as little as possible to make us more secure at home. My vote will be against those who’d continue banning stem-cell research and who, in doing so, could be coldly condemning hundreds of thousands, even millions all over the world, to death. Finally, I’m voting against those who’d take away the right of women to choose whether they wish to bear a baby. Frankly, it’s none of their friggin' business.

It comes down to these things in the end. Will we, as Americans, choose war, death and cruelty over fairness and love?

I don’t often toot my own horn. Your Wren is a quiet type, content to stay mostly in the background, puttering around, doing her own thing.

But I turned 50 today.

I’ve done a lot of things in my life up to this day. I’m an artist and a writer, and professionally, a graphic designer and a journalist.

I’ve married twice, given birth to and raised a daughter, I’m a wife and companion and I’ve cleaned countless toilets and washed more loads of dirty laundry than I care to remember.

I’ve backpacked high into the Sierras, I’ve fallen headfirst off horses and I’ve flown a two-seater plane. I’ve directed fighter jets by radio and radar as they broke the speed of sound. I’ve qualified with an M-16 rifle and once, fired a sniper’s rifle. I hit the target, too, a slip of paper on a tree way off in the distance. I’ve fired a .357 Magnum as well, but I missed that time.

I’ve hit the dirt, camera and notebook flying as tanker aircraft dropped chemical fire retardant all around me – and all over me -- during a roaring California wildfire. I’ve participated in swiftwater rescue training and tramped around with soldiers and covered my ears with my hands with them as they blew up Claymore mines. I’ve ridden in an ambulance with a grievously burned young soldier, the victim of a training exercise gone wrong, and learned why he’d joined the Army and what he faced in a future that was shaping up, tragically, to be much, much different than he’d expected.

I’ve drawn a bath in a plastic wading pool for a bald eagle (while he waited, watching impatiently three feet away) and been knocked over by a friendly Roosevelt elk, who then gave me a big, wet kiss. I’ve held a great blue heron, the victim of some irritated fisherman’s .22, as it died in my arms. I’ve raised chickens and grown vegetables and made big pots of hot, savory soup for my family and friends.

I’ve lived and traveled in Europe. I’ve been to Hitler’s Wolf Lair, chased circus elephants through an international shipping harbor and talked to the pilots who flew in the Red Baron’s squadron. I’ve skied – badly – in the Austrian Alps and lived to tell about it. I’ve taken the wrong train. I’ve been to a German concentration camp and to abandoned submarine pens on the north coast of Germany, and I’ve felt the spirits of the unquiet dead in both places.

And I’ve learned what it means to have severe, chronic rheumatoid arthritis – and carry on, anyway.

As the months passed, leading up to this quiet but special day in my life, I found a new activism growing inside me. I wasn’t content to keep my opinions to myself anymore; after living in Germany and getting to know the subdued but vital descendents of those who supported the Nazis, and also after talking to some who had been their victims, I just couldn’t stay quiet while watching my own country fall blindly into the same sort of trap. I just couldn’t.

So I started blogging. I’m learning my way around opinion writing, discovering the pitfalls and traps of assumptions and less-than-thorough research, and I’m expanding my mind and my views. Some days my posts soar, others they fall flat. I often go to bed at night with my head feeling like it’s about to burst, but it’s a curiously wonderful feeling.

I owe thanks for much of what I’ve learned to you, my readers, who I can’t help but think of as friends. And as I move forward from today, my 50th anniversary of life on this incredible Earth, I know I’m embarking on yet another adventure.

Faced with a potential loss of influence and power in the upcoming mid-term elections, President Bush calls a craven little press conference and, in an attempt to appear concerned about the slaughterhouse war he started, admits things aren’t going so well in Iraq.

He said he thinks he “owes an explanation” to the American people. Boy, does he ever. But Bush’s “explanation” today is merely more of the same empty rhetoric and just more bamboozlement. What we’ve been doing in Iraq is what we’ll continue doing in Iraq, because to do anything else would mean we were “cutting and running.”

He won’t set a timetable to remove American troops from Iraq because that would mean admitting defeat. To a man who’s failed at everything he’s done in his life, and who has always been rich enough to be able to walk away to leave others to clean up the rubble, “defeat” is a bad word.

His personal boneheadedness is killing Americans. Ninety-three have died this month alone. He admitted that, too, but offered little in the way of remorse. The man has no soul.

The Presidency of the United States was George W. Bush’s last chance to do something right and good. He blew it coming out the gate when he stole the election in Florida in order to get the prize.

The war of opportunity against Iraq was his most monumental screw-up. It has cost, and will continue to cost thousands upon thousands of American and Iraqi lives.

Even as we grieved the innocent Americans lost in the terrible attacks of Sept. 11, many Americans, myself included, knew this war was wrong, even criminal, and opposed it on those grounds. We also knew, way back in the summer of 2002 when it became clear that George was gonna have hisself a little war whether we liked it or not, that America couldn’t win it.

Even with only the vaguest understanding of the cultural and societal history of Iraq, gleaned during the Gulf War in the early 90s, we knew that to attack Iraq would mean fighting not an Iraqi Army, but a guerrilla war. We knew Saddam’s troops were toothless – the U.S. and the world had kept them that way, following Saddam’s failed attempt to take tiny, oil-rich Kuwait. G.W.’s daddy had decided not to follow Saddam back to Baghdad and overthrow his regime because he knew it would end in unmitigated disaster. It would be a debacle, a quagmire, and the cost in lives and treasure on both sides was simply unacceptable.

We knew, Colin Powell’s prevaricating tapdance before the entire world aside, that Saddam didn’t have the capability to build nuclear weapons. WMD were nothing more than pipe dreams in a toothless dictator’s head. But they were good enough for George W. Bush as an excuse to exercise his stolen power.

If the war in Iraq had merely been a mistake – on an almost unimaginable scale – things would have been different once the initial assault was over. Cooler heads would have prevailed. Instead of sitting by while looters ran rampant and infrastructure was further destroyed with the monstrous words, “stuff happens,” we’d have bitten the bullet, sent in more troops and stopped it. We’d have shown the idiots that got us there to quiet cells to await trial and set about trying to fix what they’d destroyed.

But the war against Iraq was no mistake. As long as there was no oversight, Bush and his cronies could drop their drawers and rape both Iraq and America in broad daylight, over and over again. Then they made that war the excuse to curtail civil rights at home and dismantle the Constitution, America’s very bedrock, so no one could ever stop them.

Defeat was, and is, inevitable in Iraq. I don’t believe we should “cut and run”; we’ve visited death and destruction upon an entire nation, and the only honorable thing to do is try to put it right, somehow. Redeployment may be a chance, but it also may be far too late for that.

But before we can make even a small step toward atonement, as Americans we have to stand up and admit that we were bamboozled by a cadre of wicked, ruthless, ambitious charlatans into prosecuting this war. Then we must get to the painful job of neutralizing and bringing them to justice so we can act with honor and humility.

It won’t be easy. Americans don’t like to see themselves as losers, but we’re babes in the great scheme of world history. We sure aren't the first powerful nation to overstep our bounds, and we probably won't be the last. But if we pull back from the brink now, we might survive.

We know the truth, now. If we don’t step back, we deserve to fall.

How do we punish people as deeply twisted and malignant as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzalez and Condoleeza Rice? John Wolfowitz, Colin Powell and many others, all of whom invented and spoke lies to justify waging war on Iraq?

How do we punish both Houses of Congress -- Republican and Democrat alike -- who voted to support this unspeakable atrocity?

How do we punish the ones who ignored their lies, who enabled them, who cheered them on, or who just didn’t care?

How, my friends, do we punish ourselves?

October 23, 2006

BAGHDAD — I keep seeing his face. He appears to be in his mid-20s, bespectacled, slightly bearded, and somehow his smile conveys a sense of prosperity to come. Perhaps he is set to marry, or enroll in graduate school, or launch a business — all of these flights of ambition seem possible.

In the next few images he is encased in plastic: His face is frozen in a ghoulish grimace. Blackened lesions blemish his neck.

"Drill holes," says Col. Khaled Rasheed, an Iraqi commander who is showing me the set of photographs.

He preserves the snapshots in a drawer, the image of the young man brimming with expectations always on top. There is no name, no identification, just a series of photos that documents the transformation of some mother's son into a slab of meat on a bloody table in a morgue.

"Please, please, I must show these photographs to President Bush," Rasheed pleads in desperation, as we sit in a bombed-out palace along the Tigris, once the elegant domain of Saddam Hussein's wife, now the command center for an Iraqi army battalion. "President Bush must know what is happening in Baghdad!"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-fg-baghdad23oct23,0,3894587,full.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Hat-tip to Digby at Hullabaloo.

From the NYT, in a story about blind optimism in the face of looming disaster:

Mr. Bush has been saying for months that he believes Republicans will keep control of the House and the Senate, and he is not changing his tune now, even if it means taking the rare step of rebuking his own father.
In an interview shown Sunday on ABC News, Mr. Bush was asked about a comment by the first President Bush, who said this month that he hated to think about life for his son if Democrats took control of Congress. “He shouldn’t be speculating like that, because he should have called me ahead of time,” the president said, “and I’d tell him they’re not going to.”

But Poppy Bush knows the score. As the parent of a grown but still infantile son on a one-way, petal-to-the-metal streak toward international ignominy of historic proportions, George Herbert Walker Bush has shown remarkable restraint. Until now.

As he and the Bush Matriarch sat back and watched for six years, keeping a stiff upper lip, the product of their loins has almost singlehandedly destroyed the democratic government of the greatest country on Earth, started two wars, destroyed American credibility and standing all over the world, made a hash out of international diplomacy, let New Orleans drown and stood by idly while North Korea tests its nukes.

I can just hear them over their poached extra-large eggs on toast corners at breakfast:

GHWB: (from behind his newspaper as Faux News jabbers endlessly in the background) “Barb, he’s at it again. Boy just signed that torture bill and erased habeas corpus in this country as we know it.”

BM: “Well, that will show all those meanie blogger-people. I say lock ‘em up and throw away the key. They’re all such low-lifes, anyway.”

GHWB: “But honeybuns, the right to a fair trial and all that stuff are what the U.S. Constitution stands on. This could be serious.”

BM: Georgie will handle it, Poppy. He has Karl. And that Mexican boy, whats-his-name, his attorney-whatever.”

GHWB: “His numbers are mighty low, sweetums. The rabble is gettin’ rowdy.”

BM: “The rabble are, George. Are getting rowdy.”

GHWB: “Whatever. It just has me a little worried, Babs. The Iraq thing, that’s not lookin’ good, either. I told him it was gonna be a mess, but would he listen to me? No. He just ran right out and did it anyway. Wanted to smack ‘im for that. Bandar-butt and I both told him that Saddam, the old fox, didn’t have anything to do with 9/11.”

BM: “Oh, he knew that, poopsie. Georgie only did it for you, dear. He’s a good boy.”

GHWB: “Well, the torture thing on top of the Iraq thing and the Katrina thing, not to mention the Abramoff thing, the Kenny-boy thing and the ‘My Pet Goat’ thing, and now the torture thing and the North Korea thing ...”

BM: “You worry too much, Poppy. Eat your egg before it gets cold.”

GHWB: (sighing and rustling his paper) “Well, at least he’s got Baker on the job again. Jimbo will pull his nuts out of the fire. He did it in Florida, he’ll do it again.”

BM: “That’s the spirit, dear.”

GHWB: “You know Babs, you try to raise ‘em right. Gave GW everything he needed – a good education, his own jet in the National Guard, his own baseball team, a governorship and even the presidency, but he’s just thrown it all back in my face. Now, I’m trying to stay cheerful here, but his poll numbers are in the crapper.”

BM: “George! Your language!”

GHWB: (blustering) “Don’t ‘George!’ me! Now they’re saying he could lose the House majority! Maybe even the Senate! If he loses them, Babs, it’s gonna be real hard on Georgie. Those do-gooder Dems will start all kinds of investigations and subpoena everyone. The shit will hit the fan!”

BM: (snatching the paper out of his hands) “That’s enough, you old fart! Dick and the Mexican boy have it all under control! And you know God’s been talking to Georgie when he's mountain biking.” (Tosses a bottle of pills at him) “Take your Prozac, dear. Your face is getting red.”

GHWB: (sighs and pops a pill) “I don’t know, sweetbuns. I hate to think about life for Georgie if the Democrats take control of Congress.”

BM: “Now, stop worrying, Poppy. The Diebold people are on that one. And besides, Jebby’s ready to step in and take over if ... well ... you know. If Georgie blows it again.”

GHWB: (brightening) “That’s true. Jebby’s a good boy too, isn’t he, Mommy.”

BM: “George Herbert Walker Bush! ‘Mommy!?’ I knew you and that skinny little rat-poodle Nancy had something going on the side! I’ll ‘Mommy’ you, you...”

Thanks, Poppy.

After meeting today with Yoon Kwang Ung, South Korea’s Defense Minister, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters that those darned Iraqis are just going to have to take matters in hand concerning their own security.

And the sooner the better.

Actually, he said, “sooner rather than later,” but provided no clue as to when such a turnover might happen. U.S. officials, like Gen. George Casey, the current top U.S. commander in Iraq, are, you know, working on it.

So how, exactly, is the Iraqi government supposed to take over its own country’s security? Beyond the fact that the government itself is only barely functional, it has no official military* – we fired everyone in the Iraqi Army during the giddy, free-for-all aftermath of Shock and Awe.

Most of those Iraqi soldiers – the ones who aren’t already dead or injured beyond any ability to serve – are likely today part of the sectarian religious militias which are so busily slaughtering their neighbors. Some may be in the Iraqi police force, which we’ve worked hard to build up, but which is riddled with so many of those sectarian militia members that people are as afraid of them as they are the militias themselves.

Outside of the artificial comforts of the Green Zone, electricity only works between two and four hours a day, intermittently. When people go out to buy gas for generators, or food, or go to work (if they have work) or to school, they risk being abducted and killed, or perhaps blown up by a car bomb or suicide bomber, or executed by people they used to live peacefully side-by-side with.

Nevertheless, Rummy wants the Iraqi government to take over. “When they stand up, we can stand down” and all that happy crappy. What are they supposed to take over with? Even if the Iraqi government had an army, the hard fact is that soldiers have to be fed and clothed and armed. They need medical care and vehicles, barracks and administrative support. The men need to know that their families are safe and cared for while they’re out there, fighting for their country, and they need to be paid a regular, decent wage.

Even the words “take over security” have the hollow ring of farce to them. No surprise there: Rumsfeld himself is a walking, talking farce, along with the rest of the Bush administration. (see the post about “character” below)

What’s to take over? U.S. troops certainly aren’t providing security. Instead, as Bush’s war dissolves into an Iraqi civil war our hapless soldiers hunker down in fortified hides, venturing out now and then to provide fodder for IEDs. As of today, U.S. deaths have surpassed 2,780, and there are more nearly every day. Many, many more U.S. soldiers are being terribly maimed and injured.

What a terrible, terrible joke. The U.S. isn’t providing any appreciable security for the Iraqi government to take over.

Riverbend, a young Iraqi woman living in Baghdad who writes the blog “Baghdad Burning,” posted the other day for the first time since early August. Her subject? The recent Lancet study, which estimates that more than 600,000 Iraqis have died since the U.S. attacked in March, 2003. She is understandably angry over Bush's and other U.S. officials’ casual, even offhand denial of that number. She writes,

“We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons – with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?”

Yet Rumsfeld said today,

“The biggest mistake would be to not pass things over to the Iraqis, create a dependency on their part, instead of developing strength and capacity and competence,” said Rumsfeld. “It's their country, they're going to have to govern it, they're going to have to provide security for it, and they're going to have to do it sooner rather than later. And that means they've got to take pieces of it as we go along.”

No, Mr. Rumsfeld. The biggest mistake was attacking Iraq in the first place. In fact, it was done so on the basis of lies and with no planning by a bunch of swaggering, balls-for-brains cowboys, including you, who thought attacking an Arab country which couldn’t defend itself militarily would be a cakewalk, since we had the bigger toys. You didn’t bother learning the history of Iraq or about her people, you didn’t bother learning the language, you didn’t bother to think about what might happen after the bang-bang of the airstrikes ended. You ignored everyone who brought up the specter of guerrilla warfare in Iraq, even though it was inevitable. Governments don’t win guerrilla wars with guns and bombs. They can only be ended through negotiation and diplomacy, something you and your buddies are still, to this day, rejecting as “soft.” Idiot.

Now, President Bush has been forced to concede “it’s tough” over in Iraq. Sounds concerned, doesn’t he? It’s tough. He thinks he might just have to “change tactics.” Mired in the middle of a civil war we started through our arrogance and stupidity, “changing tactics” is far too little, far too late.

Riverbend again:

Everyone knows the 'official numbers' about Iraqi deaths as a direct result of the war and occupation are far less than reality (yes -- even you war hawks know this, in your minuscule heart of hearts). This latest report is probably closer to the truth than anything that's been published yet. And what about American military deaths? When will someone do a study on the actual number of those? If the Bush administration is lying so vehemently about the number of dead Iraqis, one can only imagine the extent of lying about dead Americans…

She has a point there, that clear-eyed young woman.

What can be done? It’s time to admit that attacking Iraq was a monumental, horrifying, criminal fuck-up on the part of America’s leaders, nothing more than a blatant grab for power and lucre without regard for human lives, Iraqi or American. Those leaders should be relieved of power, locked up and tried as war criminals before a world court, and the American forces still serving in Iraq should come home before more of them are killed or injured. After all, they’re more than soldiers – they’re our family.

And then, the American tax dollars now being spent to keep the bloody war machine grinding out nightmarish destruction and to make criminal American corporations rich should be used to try to rebuild and restore peace to the region.

Will it work? Probably not. It surely won’t end the sectarian civil war now underway in Iraq, nor will it bring peace or prosperity to the rest of the world, which depends on the oil that comes from the Middle East. It won’t bring back the thousands and thousands of people we’ve killed, Iraqi and American alike, or be much comfort to their grieving families.

But it would be a damned good start.

*My mistake: There is indeed an Iraqi army (small “a”) which has been trained by U.S. forces, along with the Iraqi police. Together they form the Iraqi Security Force. According to U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Caldwell, who spoke during a press briefing on Oct. 19, the force numbers 312,000. Those forces were turned over to the Iraqi government on Sept. 6, 2006.

There are 26 million Iraqis.

According to a story posted on Catholic Online,

“‘The rising number of civilian casualties shows that civilians are the targets of this war,’ said Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, which lobbies Congress on peace and justice issues.

‘I don't know how we can square that with our Catholic Gospel values,’ she said.

Sister Simone, a Sister of Social Service, said Network maintains contact with 14 Iraqi women, several of whom came to the United States earlier this year to talk to lawmakers.

‘They don't think this (601,000) [from the Lancet study] is a wrong number,’ she said.

Four of the women have lost close relatives, she added. ‘Often they don't know what happens to the loved ones. They just disappear.’

A key problem in the civil strife is that different branches of the Iraqi military and police forces are infiltrated by militia members of rival political factions who use the security forces for partisan attacks, she said.

‘There is not a strong sense of identity to Iraq. Identity is more toward a sectarian militia or clan,’ she said. "

I think my point still stands.

With a straight face, George W. Bush declared this week, Oct. 15 through Oct. 21, National Character Counts Week.

It is deliciously droll, isn’t it?