The New Year is our time for high hopes and fresh starts. But 2007 begins with America’s conscience dragging behind us over half a million corpses from the Bush invasion and occupation in Iraq.
The web site icasualties.org keeps accurate figures on the numbers of American dead. The gruesome figure now approaches 3,000. Estimates elsewhere say that 655,000 other human beings have been killed in their homeland, Iraq. Each was a sacred life; each left behind a circle of suffering survivors.
Even though the Nov. 7 election, union resolutions and numerous polls show that the American people want to withdraw troops, the Bush administration is deaf to this clamor. Instead, the White House and its helpmates in the commercial media are trying to turn the debate into whether or not to send more troops, and how many.
Bush told reporters that he saw the election as a mandate for a bipartisan solution to obtain “victory” in Iraq, and they reported it with straight faces. The Pentagon asked for another $100 billion, which would bring the cost of Bush’s Mideast adventures to a par with the entire cost of the invasion and occupation of Vietnam.
To put our shame and these war dead to rest, Americans have to look to ourselves. We cannot leave it to the politicians to end our disastrous aggression. Many of them rely too heavily on corporate campaign cash, and the corporations are responsible for the Bush policies followed so far.
Only by organizing the great responsible masses of Americans can we hope to put an end to this war and the pointless daily sacrificing of human life in the Middle East. Let us resolve to make 2007 the last year we have to carry this shameful burden of death and destruction.
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