Let Them Eat Bombs
The doubling of child malnutrition in Iraq is baffling
by Terry Jones

A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now. This, of course, comes as a bitter blow for all those of us who, like George Bush and Tony Blair, honestly believe that children thrive best when we drop bombs on them from a great height, destroy their cities and blow up hospitals, schools and power stations.

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The Cruel Month...
by Riverbend

Thousands were demonstrating today all over the country. Many areas in Baghdad were cut off today for security reasons and to accomodate the demonstrators, I suppose. There were some Sunni demonstrations but the large majority of demonstrators were actually Shia and followers of Al Sadr. They came from all over Baghdad and met up in Firdaws Square- the supposed square of liberation. They were in the thousands. None of the news channels were actually covering it. Jazeera showed fragments of the protests in the afternoon but everyone else seemed to busy with some other news story.

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US Millions in Iraq Wasted

I saw Lewis Black, the comedian, in Detroit last month. Lewis does angry humor. But at one point he went on a rant about how you just had to look around Detroit to see how the Congress was allowing our cities to deteriorate, and he flew into a genuine rage. A little sheepish, he admitted, "That was a private moment, and I'm sorry you had to see it. Note to self: just getting mad without a joke is not cool." It is such a shame that there is virtually nothing going on on the streets downtown Detroit in the evening. Even the Borders closes at 7 pm. A single block in Greektown and the casinos are the only exceptions, as far as downtown shops go. An entertainment venue like Cobo Hall is designed so that the suburbanites can actually exit into its parking lot from the freeway, and never have to deal with the city at all. Because Detroit fell below a million in population with the last census, it even lost a good deal of Federal aid. The true cost of the Iraq misadventure is consistently underestimated by the Bush administration, which does not even include the extra funds in the budget deficit! They even sneak the wounded soldiers back into this country so that the public does not get an accurate sense of the war's human costs for Americans.

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How many have gone to war?
Even experts are surprised at the vast numbers of U.S. soldiers who have been deployed after 9/11. Even if troop levels in Iraq are cut next year, the military may be permanently damaged.

Three and a half years have passed since U.S. bombs started falling in Afghanistan, and ever since then, the U.S. military has been engaged in combat overseas. What most Americans are probably unaware of, however, is just how many American soldiers have been deployed. Well over 1 million U.S. troops have fought in the wars since Sept. 11, 2001, according to Pentagon data released to Salon. As of Jan. 31, 2005, the exact figure was 1,048,884, approximately one-third the number of troops ever stationed in or around Vietnam during 15 years of that conflict. More surprising is the number of troops who have gone to war since 9/11, come back home, and then were redeployed to the battle zone. Of all the troops ever sent to Iraq or Afghanistan, one-third have gone more than once, according to the Pentagon. In the regular Army, 63 percent of the soldiers have been to war at least one time, and almost 40 percent of those soldiers have gone back. The highest rate of first-time deployments belongs to the Marine Corps Reserve: Almost 90 percent have fought.

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An Iraqi Potemkin Village
Bush's phony 'global democratic revolution' is failing in Iraq

As we approach the second anniversary of the "liberation" of Iraq – marked by the much-touted toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad's main square – a simple juxtaposition of photos reveals the utter phoniness of the American project in the Middle East. Of course, Antiwar.com was all over that particular deception as it was happening, but in revisiting it two years later, it is instructive to note that the same square was filled the other day by tens of thousands of Iraqis demanding that the U.S. leave Iraq forthwith. The myth and the reality are not merely divergent – they are completely opposed to each other in every conceivable way, and nothing illustrates this more dramatically than the rhetoric of our deluded president, who recently addressed U.S. troops in Ft. Hood, Texas: "As the Iraq democracy succeeds, that success is sending a message from Beirut to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a crushing defeat to the forces of tyranny and terror, and a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." As radical Islamists– in league with Iran – tighten their grip on Iraqi society, George W. Bush's glorious "global democratic revolution" marches on. What baloney! Our president, however, is undeterred by the facts: "The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad will be recorded," he averred, "alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one of the great moments in the history of liberty." The toppling of the statue was a staged event, from start to finish, pulled off with tight camera angles (masking the paucity of the crowd) and the logistical and military support of American troops, who had just rolled into Baghdad. The fall of the Berlin Wall, on the other hand, was not brought about by an American invasion: it was a genuinely spontaneous revolution made possible by the German people themselves and the self-dissolution of the Communist parties of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

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