Life Together: How many? How long? Why?

Eight more of America's courageous soldiers died today in Iraq. Untold (literally) hundreds more Iraqis have died this week. Children have lost parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Parents have lost children forever, without, in most cases, even a body to bury..or anything recognizable as the person that was loved. How many more people have to die?

Over 1600 American soldiers have lost their lives in the name of "fighting terrorism", but we have to ask if the world is a safer place since this war began?

In addition to the nearly 3000 lives lost in the World Trade Center, we keep adding to a list of the killed, and the insurgency just seems to gain strength. Osama Ben Laden, whom we originally set out to capture, is rarely even on the radar screen either of the citizens of this nation, or of the media. We are not defeating terrorism, but making more terrorists whose perceived only avenue of resistance is the terrible evil of suicide bombings. Iraq, under Saddam, suffered from terrible oppression, but the killing and loss of life goes on and on and on, with more lives lost than under Saddam Hussein's terrible dictatorship. Meanwhile, we have not been seen as the liberators of the Iraqi people but as the cause of the on-going violence in their nation. We were told that with the election, things would begin to calm down and the insurgency would lose its will to fight. The contrary seems more accurate.

Moreover, we discover, in the most under-reported, and most under-discussed news of the year, that months before the President argued that Saddam had refused to obey the UN resolution, that the President of a land committed to the supposed religious principles of honesty and truth telling, justice and liberty, was having intelligence reports shaped in such a way as to justify a pre-emptive attack on a nation that really was no threat at all to our country long before he had the so-called legal justification. How much dishonesty does it take to start an impeachment hearing? The President of the United States, George W. Bush, lied to the American people, and he used people such as his Secretary of State, Colin Powell, mercilessly, in the deception. He used our military. He abused the American people's trust.

And we wonder why citizens of many other countries in the middle east, and elsewhere, despise this Administration, and by association, all Americans? Do we remember how long it has taken some of our parents and grandparents to come to terms with modern-day Germans or Japanese? It will take two to three generations before many people in the middle-east will ever be able to see the United States as anything other than an imperialist aggrandizer.

How long? we ask, wondering if we will ever be able to bring our military home. We wonder if the people of Iraq are not now set upon a path to an ongoing civil insurgency, if not outright civil war. There still seems to be no plan to extricate ourselves from Iraq. I have to guess that the reason there is no plan is that the present U.S. Administration does not plan to ever leave, that we invaded a country that was not a threat to us for the sake of their oil, and the sake of saying "we're bigger than you are." Many of the U.N inspectors tried to tell us that Iraq was no threat, but these world-approved inspectors were scorned for the sake of what?

How many more must die? How long will we go without honesty? How long must the people of both America and Iraq wait until there is a plan for the departure of the "coalition of the willing", who more accurately should be called the coalition of the gullible?

Why are the people of this country accepting all this so passively? Why are we willing to swallow untruths about Abu Graib, about the treatment of prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq? Why are falsehoods presented as if they are in our best interests? Why are truths, such as the British memo that reveals that the U.S. President was planning war, and shaping the facts to suit his intentions, far earlier than Bush will admit, hidden, undiscussed, left to molder in small print in the middle pages of newspapers that aren't even read by the majority of our U.S. citizens? When will we say, "Enough!" This is our country, and we are better people than this.

Lord, make us instruments of thy peace...

In hope of unity, justice, and peace, Nancy Jo