1,542 and counting

This WaPo online exhibit helps us keep track of all the U.S. enlisted folks who've paid the ultimate price for Bush's games. 1,542 right now. That's just the dead - not the injured, severely injured, brain-damaged, crippled, emotionally destroyed, etc.

Read through the list. Every po-dunk town in America. Young. Old. Roadside bombs. Over, and over, and over again. Roadside bombs. All. Day. Long.

Guys inside military vehicles hitting some rough spots in the road, flipping the vehicle into some ditch that is filled with water. The exhibit doesn't explicitly state 'drowning', but that's the implication. And that has to be a horrific way to die - being completely disoriented, gasping for air inside a cramped, dark container vehicle, uselessly pounding on the metal coffin that now guarantees to bring you to your maker. You're scared, but you're still conscious - you work furiously for a minute or so, before you just have to take a breath - but that breath only gets you a mouth and throat full of water. Water fills your lungs, and soon - hopefully - you black out. And then you die.

What on God's green earth are we still doing there?

UPDATE: Let's not forget, with Rummy running this war, you're just as likely to get your head blown off. Rumsfeld and this entire administration should be jailed for life - at least.

UPDATE: Had another thought today on Rummy. Rummy's goals in Iraq and elsewhere do seem a bit ambiguous, and perhaps it's a little difficult to believe that he's not actually trying to downsize our military force by killing them off, but there's another explanation - sabotage. That's right. But not sabotage for its own sake - but for the sake of humanity - the larger goals of humanity - the propagation of the species.

In this scenario, Rummy has actually seen the light - he now knows that the U.S. is its own worst enemy, and is also the biggest threat to the 'civilized' world, and the human race. But he doesn't tell anyone, because he knows he'll get shitcanned as soon as he mentions that he's landed back on earth with the reality-based community. To prevent the neocons and the theocracts from bringing about Rapture, Rummy sets about strengthening the insurgency with particular care not to make it too obvious what his true goals are. He doesn't actually deliver massive amounts of weapons into the hands of the insurgency leaders - he just leaves them unguarded. He doesn't purposely lose battles, he just makes sure that our troops are undermanned and underequipped to handle the job. He doesn't explicitly reduce the fighting capability of the forces in theatre, he just keeps the troops on ever-longer deployments to destroy their morale, and with it their fighting effectiveness.

In this 'sabotage scenario', Rummy's got it tough - he has to straddle the line between incompetence and hardline ideology - both of which will keep him in strong favor with the current regime. Importantly, he knows he has to continue to make corporations aligned with the Bush administration lots of money - lots. He knows happy corporations yield happy politicians and happy media coverage, and all of that allows him to stay in power and get the U.S. ever-closer to defeat. So far he's achieved this sustaining goal in spades.

The question is, at what point does Rummy manage to pull off his own Tet offensive - the insurgent attack that breaks the will of the American people for this war? And how many GI's does he need to have killed/maimed/kidnapped/tortured to jolt the American people out of their stupor, without provoking them so much that they nuke Baghdad after clearing the green zone of U.S. personnel? (Of course, he knows that Truman dropped the bomb on American POW's in Hiroshima, so the Bushies would probably do the same in Baghdad.) 200 GI's? About as many as Reagan's disaster in Beirut (241)? 500? Maybe a Clintoneque Somalia-like moment with several U.S. marines being dragged, partially conscious and bloodied, through the streets of Baghdad, as the world watches - in the latest and greatest of reality tv shows since the first day of the illegal invasion of Iraq was televised to the world?

Again, Rummy knows he has to stay in power long enough to make sure that America is well into the jaws of defeat in Iraq before he 'retires for personal reasons' at the behest of the corporate White House. How does he do it? Time will tell. All eyes on Rummy.