News Timelines and Deadlines
posted by on December 6 at 11:30 AM
The Iraq Study Group report is now in, but the debate about timelines and deadlines for various changes of course continues.
Meanwhile, there’s another deadline approaching, along a timeline that no one can quite predict, although this deadline now seems certain to arrive in the next few months.
The official body count for American soldiers in Iraq now stands at 2,887. The unofficial count, which is more up-to-the-minute, puts the American death toll at above 2,900.
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, whose memory was used to frighten and confuse the American people into supporting the unrelated adventure in Iraq, killed 2,973 people (2,997 if you count the missing, and a bit over 3,000 if you count the hijackers).
Sad particulars aside, the number of Sept. 11 deaths is fixed in the mind of the average American at “around 3,000.” When the body count in Iraq comes to include more than 3,000 dead American soldiers, as it will relatively soon, the cold (and generally silent) cost-benefit analysis that most people make when thinking about the war in Iraq will cease to produce an acceptable result, even for those who still think Iraq is a rational response to Sept. 11, or to the threat of terrorism in general.
When American deaths in Iraq pass 3,000 we will no longer be talking about the relative merits of “stay the course” or parsing the various definitions of “victory.” We will be talking about a project that has killed more Americans than the event whose reoccurence it was supposed to prevent.
At that point, all the lines the Bush administration has used to justify the Iraq war will be, politically speaking, dead.
not to mention the fact that around that many iraqi civilians are killed every month.
that assumes anyone in W's camp use logic. Believe me, when you point this out to one if W's apologists, they will not be buying it.
Don't count on Bush's base, or even the majority of Americans, to give a shit about the Iraqi death count.
You're totally wrong, Eli. For the Bush crowd, the score is not: 3,000 died in 9/11 and 3,000 died now, so the Iraq invasion was a bad idea.
Rather it's this formula:
9/11: Terrorists beat us 2,973 to 19.
Post-911: we beat the terrorists 655,000 to 3,000.
"At that point, all the lines the Bush administration has used to justify the Iraq war will be, politically speaking, dead."
Ummm..... The terrorist line was DOA. The humanitarian line was dead by 1986 at the latest, when the Reagan administration funded his WMDs. And the WMD line was dead AS WELL AS beating the dead terrorism horse into more of a pulpy mush when it turned out the US didn't even guard Sadaam's weapons sites from looters after they took over (and most were subsequently looted, I'm too lazy to find the NYT article)
The issues driving the war now are massive humanitarian disaster if we leave (probably legitimate, at least until we lose all semblance of control) and Shiite control of a hefty chunk of the world's oil supply which remains quite significant to anybody worried about the maintenance of American world Hegemony, which is a lot more than you'd think.
Sooo I actually don't think the death count is meaningful at all.
"At that point, all the lines the Bush administration has used to justify the Iraq war will be, politically speaking, dead."
Ummm..... The terrorist line was DOA. The humanitarian line was dead by 1986 at the latest, when the Reagan administration funded his WMDs. And the WMD line was dead AS WELL AS beating the dead terrorism horse into more of a pulpy mush when it turned out the US didn't even guard Sadaam's weapons sites from looters after they took over (and most were subsequently looted, I'm too lazy to find the NYT article)
The issues driving the war now are massive humanitarian disaster if we leave (probably legitimate, at least until we lose all semblance of control) and Shiite control of a hefty chunk of the world's oil supply which remains quite significant to anybody worried about the maintenance of American world Hegemony, which is a lot more than you'd think.
Sooo I actually don't think the death count is meaningful at all.
aghhh sorry for the double post, you guys have to change your script so that hitting the post button immediately closes the window.
The Iraqis are beating themselves.
Troops home now!ASAP.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIehhCuq8dY
let the middleeast sort it out who runs Iraq.
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