Can you count to five?

[Terre Haute Tribune Star, March 25, 2007]

Can you count to five?

We are going into the fifth year of the unnecessary disaster that is the Iraq War. We should all stop at least once a day and count to five. Then we should think about counting to six, to seven, to eight, nine and ten.

That’s what George Bush is asking. He has said Iraq will be the problem of the president elected in 2008. His failed presidency is on schedule to pass along his failed war to others.

He is telling you to just keep counting.

Can you count to 3,218?

3,218 Americans have died doing their duty in a far off land. At home, a blind policy fueled by arrogance, ignorance and stubbornness continues to deploy, re-deploy, and re-re-deploy exhausted and under-trained troops. Our finest are thrown into a tragedy that great courage cannot blunt.

3,218 dead. Five reasons have been given for their dying. Please count off the five shifting and shifty reasons given for these deaths.

One, non-existent WMDs; two, a fabricated Osama-Saddam-9/11 connection; three, a wild Bush gamble on democratizing the middle-east through force of arms; four, a presumptuous belief that it is the role of the United States to unify the Iraqi people; and five, the surge, a feeble and doomed attempt to stop an unstoppable religious civil war in Iraq.

Keep counting. Our so-called “mission” in Iraq is changing again. Each mission in the past was supported by lies too hidden and too numerous to count. This is happening again. Iran is fast emerging as the next Iraq war-related mission.

So Bush tells us to keep counting. If you choose to count to five and beyond, sad and deadly numbers will continue to grow.

But you can decide and demand that the counting must stop–now; that the dying must stop–now; that the war must stop–now.