Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
4000
US death toll in Iraq hits 4000.
. . . which does not count the number of US soldiers injured.
. . . which does not count the friends and family members of those dead or injured soldiers, folks whose lives have been harmed or ruined.
. . . which does not count dead Iraqi civilians, their friends, their family members.
. . . which does not count the enormous drain on society and the world: think of all the good ways there are to spend a trillion dollars.
Peace.
D.
Just wanted to elaborate on that last bit.
You know how folks like to joke about ending hunger and poverty, curing cancer, solving global warming, or coming up with clean, renewable energy sources to free us from petroleum? As if it’s so impossible, let’s just laugh about it. And in my spare time, I shall end poverty in the third world. Ha-ha.
But a trillion dollars — a thousand billion. Might not solve all of those problems, but it would certainly have fixed a few. Damn.
🙁
one of my boyfriend’s close friends just left saturday to serve in iraq.
🙁
What’s a trillion dollars these days?
That’s something like $3000 dollars for every man, woman, and child in the US. Given that you, Doug, are in the upper tax bracket, that probably means that you, Doug, have paid or will pay something on the order of $30,000 for the Iraq war. So not only is it a stupid war (and probably an illegal one, and possibly immoral), it is costing you an assload of money.
Put another way: if you took that same amount of money, you could pay for health insurance for every child in the US and have a ton left over. You could build simple housing for every homeless person.
What’s a trillion dollars these days? It is a hell of a lot of money, and a big portion of it has been spirited away into various people’s pockets.
The soldiers who died did not die against their will. They joined the military, so they expected this. They WANT to fight. If they didn’t want to fight, then they wouldn’t have joined. Yes, it’s a shame some of them die, but the POSITIVE side of the issue is we are defending our country from Iraq, a country which harbors terrorists.
Dean: exactly.
Chris: since I’m a doctor, let me use a medical analogy. Let’s say a patient goes to a surgeon and the surgeon says, “You need your gallbladder removed. Sign this consent, please.”
The patient, assuming competence on the part of the surgeon, signs on the line and shows up the next week for surgery.
The surgeon wakes up that morning with a hangover, fixes himself a couple of vodka tonics so that his hands won’t shake so much. There, that’s better. You know, this feels like a good day to do the operation using the endoscopes. He hasn’t done too many that way, but it’s all a matter of practice, right? And besides, the younger surgeons in town all do ’em that way. Him and his humongous abdominal incisions — he’s beginning to look bad.
The circulating nurse let’s the nursing student prep the patient. She does an atrocious job of it, but the circulator doesn’t notice. She’s too busy chatting up the anesthesiologist. The surgeon notices, but hey, so what if the operative site isn’t sterile. That’s what pre-operative antibiotics are good for! We go to surgery with the patient we have, not the patient we’d like to have.
During the case, the surgeon perforates the patient’s bowel, then fixes the problem with a less-than-optimal technique. But at least he fixed that perforation; there are two others he missed.
Patient dies of massive sepsis on post-op day three . . . but hey, he consented for surgery, right? What fool doesn’t know there are surgical risks? He WANTED that gallbladder to come out. He volunteered!
***
And you forgot one right wing talking point: “We’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here.” Thanks. I don’t think I could have thought of a medical analogy for that canard.
Tell that to Pat Tillman’s mother.
Iraq didn’t harbour terrorists under Sadaam. The alleged link to Al-Qaeda was not proven and Baathis Iraq was very secular and itself afraid of Islamic fundamentalism. Polls have shown, however, that many Americans believe that Al-Qaeda was active in Iraq and that Iraq was connected to 9/11. Now, however, there are indeed terrorists in Iraq, many of whom have come from outside Iraq to fight the invaders.
Wanting to fight is not the same as wanting to die. And I don’t think one can say that everyone in the military signed up because they wanted to fight.
Lastly, we are not defending our country from Iraq. Iraq is not and was not threatening the U.S. Al-Qaeda and other extremist organizations are threatening the U.S. and other Western countries. Other countries are said to harbor terrorists (Syria, North Korea, for example), but we are not fighting them. Other countries have or are trying to get WMD (again North Korea among others), but we are not fighting them. Other countries have undemocratic, authoritarian regimes (North Korea, Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, etc.), but we are not fighting them. A suspicious person might think that there is something special about Iraq…