Not so lolcat

Not to be glib and hold forth on the obvious and feed blogger stereotypes but, c’mon, last month marked five years of Operation Quagmire, which means there are people whose entire college or high school years have been marked by this war, which has meant death, disfigurement, lies, the politics of fear, and our bungling about as a nation inciting hatred abroad and spending deficit money on Halliburton. Had enough yet? Bush will not accomplish any mission in Iraq. He has failed and says it’s up to the next president to finish “protecting our way of life,” or whatever is recognizably left of what we once used to proudly refer to with those words. Helluva job Bushie!

Some fifth-anniversary stats:

90,000 Iraqi civilians dead.
4,000 American soldiers dead.
158,000 American troops still occupying Iraq.
$3 trillion wasted.

"Americans are not casualty averse. They are failure averse," Carafano said. "They were unhappy with the lack of progress and spiraling violence. That is why you have seen public support rebound after it was clear the surge was working."

The number killed in Iraq is far less than in other modern American wars. In Vietnam, the U.S. lost on average about 4,850 troops a year from 1963-75. In the Korean war, from 1950-53, the U.S. lost about 12,300 soldiers a year.

A 2006 Duke University study found that it was 100 times as likely that an American knew one of the 292,000 Americans killed in World War II than someone today would know a service member slain in Iraq.

Yeah EDUCATION!!!!
No end in sight.

The $3 trillion we’ve spent on Iraq could have, for example, brought an end to crushing student debt. Projected spending on the war for next year alone would provide scholarships for 21,552,257 college students but we’d have to get Bush and the scared-to-death Congress people, Bush’s vassals, to want to fund education not occupation.