Last month in Iraq, 64 more Americans died. This brings the total of American troops killed in the Iraq war to 3,807 as of Monday. Of course, the Bush administration is trying to frame it as a good thing. They want you to believe that the surge is working since this is the lowest number of Americans killed in four months.
Frederick Kagan, one of the architects of the "troop surge", says that U.S. troops have now secured most of the troubled areas in Baghdad, and that is why American deaths are lower. That's pure crap.
First of all, American deaths are not that much lower than the last two months. The website icasualties.org puts the number killed at 66 instead of 64. There were 84 killed in August and 78 killed in July.
That doesn't sound like that much of a drop to me, and 64-66 deaths is still far too many Americans to die when nothing is being accomplished. Nothing, that is, except to help our enemies to win the civil war in that country.
The tiny drop in American deaths had nothing to do with the surge. The real reason is because Shiite leader Muqtada al Sadr (pictured above) has ordered his troops to stop fighting. Sadr, who is an ally of Iran, has decided to sit on the sidelines and let us fight the Sunnis for him. He knows that when we leave he can overthrow the puppet government and establish a Shiite state allied with Iran, because Shiites are the majority population and are well-armed.
So while we fight the Sunnis and Americans die, Sadr just waits in the wings to establish his Shiite theocracy. Does it make any sense that Americans are dying to give Iran a powerful new ally in the region? Thanks to Bush, that's exactly what we're doing and there's little we can do to prevent it.
If the Shiites are going to take over (and it looks like they will), they should have to do it on their own. We should not do it for them. Neither the Shiites nor the Sunnis are our friends, and neither is worth more American deaths.
It is time to withdraw our troops -- the sooner the better. It is time our government realized that the puppet government will not survive no matter which side wins the civil war, and neither side will let us have the oil that Bush covets so much.
None of the possible outcomes is worth the life of a single American soldier.
They want you to believe that the surge is working since this is the lowest number of Americans killed in four months.
ReplyDeleteActually, it's the lowest in 14 months (not four). It's still too high, but I just wanted to point out that factual error.