Fourteen Marines and a civilian interpreter were killed Wednesday when
their amphibious assault vehicle struck an improvised explosive device
about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) south of Haditha, Iraq, military
officials said.
Wednesday's attack follows the killings of six Marines Monday in
Haditha, which is in northwest Iraq. Another Marine was killed in a
suicide car bombing in nearby Hit on Monday, the Marine Corps said. A
suicide car bomber attacked a U.S. military convoy Tuesday as it
traveled though an underpass beneath al-Tahrir Square in Baghdad,
wounding 29 people, Iraqi police said. Fifteen vehicles were destroyed.
Essay on President Bush and Death - An essay by E.L Doctorow
I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is.
He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to
be what they could be.
On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the
lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what
death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of
necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower
could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for
it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the
WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the
stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd,
smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't
understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a
speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the
brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their
country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an
emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he
has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for
the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could
be.
[....]
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets
nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he
knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled
plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission- accomplished a
disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his
war in Iraq has licensed it.
So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought
this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not
the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew
those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is
one of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because
you want to but because you have to.
[...]
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the
nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable
national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of
lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people
he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us
into, is his characteristic trouble.
Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report.
He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we
sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and
ineffective war-making, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and
the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a
figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.
You've got to wonder how the war cheerleaders and chickenhawks sleep at night. Maybe Colin Powell answered this two years ago;
"Powell described his killer schedule in an interview Thursday with
Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, a reporter for a London-based Saudi newspaper.
"So do you use sleeping tablets to organize yourself?" Al-Rashed asked.
"Yes. Well, I wouldn't call them that," Powell said. "They're a
wonderful medication -- not medication. How would you call it? They're
called Ambien, which is very good.You don't use Ambien? Everybody here
uses Ambien."
So where's the progress we keep hearing about? The only
thing progressing is the body count. I'm sure this is the very last throe.
Two young soldiers who served in the Iraq war have
killed themselves in separate incidents in Killeen since the weekend,
post officials said Wednesday.
Sgt. Robert Decouteaux, 24, of Rosedale, N.Y., died Saturday from a
self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had been airlifted from his home to a
Temple hospital for emergency surgery, but he died while doctors tried
to save his life.
And on Monday morning, Spc. Robert Hunt, 22, of Houston, was found dead
in his apartment by Killeen police, who were alerted after members of
his unit tried to contact him when he failed to report to work.
Carol Smith, a Killeen police spokeswoman, said Wednesday that Hunt's cause of death was listed as asphyxiation.
They should be counted as Iraq war casualties just like all the soldiers who die there.
