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Al Jazeera (English)
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Iraqi Civilian Deaths ... caused by Bush's unprovoked war

 

Bush Calls Iraq War Insignificant
(The Japan Times, 8 October 2006)
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: As a combat veteran of the American war in Viet Nam, I find it appalling that Bush thinks that the sacrifices of our troops are insignificant. He thinks the American war on Iraq will take up only a single comma in the history books of the future. Is this what our brave troops are dying for? Is this the kind of leadership the military deserves?]

Hitting the campaign trail in the past few weeks in the runup to midterm U.S. elections, the president has found himself on the defensive as the news from Iraq suggests that the beleaguered country is edging daily closer to civil war. . . . Not so, says Mr. Bush. This difficult period may seem protracted now, a tunnel without the remotest glimmer of a light. But, he said on CNN last month, "when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma." Apparently liking the way that sounded, he proceeded to air the comma analogy at least twice more on subsequent campaign stops, most recently last Tuesday. . . . On behalf of bereaved coalition families and Iraqi civilians alike, many immediately interpreted the phrase as a revealing slight, trivializing the tens of thousands of military and civilian deaths incurred in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. . . . How, they railed, could Mr. Bush call such a bloody, intractable conflict a "comma," a mere squiggle on time's page? Barely a soul dissented: The president had either finally exposed the basic callousness that took him into Iraq in the first place or lost his grip on the language altogether. Perhaps both. . . . "That the president of the United States is describing a war that has caused so much pain and suffering and opened a Pandora's Box in the Middle East with the words of a ditzy comic is bad enough," one American newspaper editorialized. "That he manages to mangle the phrase in the process is appalling."

posted by LoZo 9:22 AM