Em sent me this image this morning, gleaned from the blog American Leftist. In the words of the artist, "It's a mosaic composed of the photos of the American service men and women who have died in Iraq. No photograph is used more than three times." This is one of those instances where a picture, or hundreds of them, are worth a thousand words.
I've been saving up topics to blog about, hoping to jump start this again. I've been so busy with work and settling into the new apartment (which I'd decided nobody but me wanted to hear about) that I haven't been blogging or even thinking much. I'd more or less given up blogging about the war, in part because other people, particularly George Paine of Warblogging and Christopher Allbritton of Back to Iraq 3.0 do it so much better than I do, and with so much more dedication, but after the Falluja offense and the current uprising (which I think really is an uprising, as opposed to the isolated protests the government claims it is.), I feel compelled to say something, if only to keep pointing out what a huge freaking mistake this whole endeavor was, and how duplicitious the Bush administration has been (as becomes clearer every day) in dragging the U.S. into this.
A couple of weeks ago, the Village Voice published four tabloid pages of casualties, outlining in detail the deaths of US soldiers since Bush stood on the deck of that carrier, disgracing his flight suit, and gave a novel version of the bird to his constituents with the same thumb he's been sitting on since taking office. It is an abominable toll for such a lie. On my old blog, I tried to keep a running tally of casualties on both sides, and I may have to do that again, along with setting up the links I had there.
Also a couple of weeks ago, my cousin Gary (son of my dad's brother), who's been a marine for most of his life, got in contact with me, having tracked me down via my website. There aren't a lot of Kottners in the world, apparently, and we all seem to be related to each other. Gary credits Dad, who was a 20 year Air Force veteran and a 20 year civil service employee, with getting him interested in the armed forces and aviation, and yet, wow, they're politically polar opposites. Dad hates Bush, and though he thinks the troops are and have been getting a raw deal (they get charged for their hospital meals when they're recovering from combat wounds!), he hates this war as much as I do. Gary, bless his heart, sent me a photo from a Navy vessel somewhere that had been stenciled with the numbers of casualties from the accumulated terrorist attacks in the last ten years (various embassies, marine barracks, the USS Cole, the WTC), below the legend "Why we are here." I didn't reply to it because the only civil thing I could think to say was "I wish it were that simple." Richard Clarke's book, Against All Enemies, gives that notion the lie.
Then Em sends this picture. You'd think she was trying to cattle prod me, or something.
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