Coalition forces, commanded by President George W. Bush and his obsequious ally, British Prime MinisterTony Blair, still have not found any weapons of mass destruction after almost six months of searching and destruction in Iraq. Nor have they established any concrete ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Queda, the Taliban or Osama Bin Laden.
Six months after the bombs and rockets began raining down on Iraq, its soldiers and its citizenry, United States military men and women are still dying. Before Bush declared the war on Iraq, Donald”Let’s Rumble” Rumsfeld said, in so many words, the conflict would be a cakewalk. Some cakewalk.
Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and bragged about training firepower on Iraq so massive and destructive that the world had never seen anything like it. He also said, in effect, that the war was over, that it had been won by the mighty, moral forces, primarily, of the United States, England and Australia.
The war that was supposed to be a cakewalk has cost United States taxpayers more than $83 billion and the cost is still rising. Bush recently asked for $87 billion more for the war against Iraq.
This is in addition to the $79 billion Congress approved in April. Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the powerful Foreign Relations Committee believes that 40,000 more U. S. military personnel will be needed to conclusively win the war and he estimates that it will cost several hundred billion dollars over the next several years.
The cost in American lives is also rising. So far, 279 have been lost and an average of two more die each week. Although no weapons of mass destruction have been found, Bush justifies the loss of American lives by claiming that Iraq had a weapons of mass destruction ” program.”
He said, “…our country made the right decision [by invading Iraq].” In actuality, the country did not make the decision to bomb Iraq. Bush made it. How many more American lives must be lost before the avaricious, vindictive people who started it bring this hellish, immoral war to an end?
In his first major address last year dealing with his intent to go to war, Bush sprinkled his snow job about weapons of mass destruction, human rights violations and a litany of other lies all over the American landscape.
He concluded that address by saying, “After all, this is the man who tried to kill my dad.” It seems that the deaths of Husseins’two sons should be revenge enough but apparently it isn’t because war rages on without any end in sight. A prominent U.S. military commander said it would ” be years” before Iraq is back to normal.
Sen. John McCain, a decorated war hero who is of Bush’s own Republican party, and who recently returned from Iraq said that he believes at least one more division of about 17,000 soldiers is necessary to bring the war to an honorable, victorious end.
All of the oil in Iraq is not worth all of the American lives that have been lost in this unjustifiable war. And that includes the 141 who have died since Bush stood on the deck of that billion-dollar aircraft carrier and declared that we had won the war.