For No Good Reason - New York Times
The New York Times

October 3, 2005

For No Good Reason
By
BOB HERBERT

"
You can keep the flowers blooming on their graves forever. It won't change
the fact that they died for nothing."

- antiwar protester, circa 1969

It's finally becoming clear on Capitol Hill, and maybe even in the White
House, that the United States cannot win the war in Iraq. The only question
still
to be decided is how many more American lives will be wasted in George W.
Bush's grand debacle.

The wheels have fallen off the cart in Iraq, and only those in the farthest
reaches of denial are hanging on to the illusion of an American triumph over
the insurgency.

Air Force General Richard Myers, who retired Friday as chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, was publicly chastised at an Armed Services Committee
hearing
last week by Senator John McCain of Arizona, who has always been a strong
proponent of the war.

Senator McCain bluntly declared that "things have not gone as we had planned
or expected, nor as we were told by you, General Myers."

The general replied, "I don't think this committee or the American public
has ever heard me say that things are going very well in Iraq."

The gruesome events throughout Iraq over the past month or so were
understandably overshadowed in the American media by the obliteration of New
Orleans
and other matters connected to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. An apocalyptic
tone was set on Aug. 31 when nearly 1,000 people were killed in a stampede
on
a bridge in northern Baghdad. The stampede was provoked by rumors of a
suicide bomber.

Another two dozen Iraqis were killed in attacks by insurgents on Sept. 3. A
few days later a taxi blew up outside a crowded restaurant in Basra, killing
16. That attack came just hours after four American contractors in Basra
were killed by a bomb that was detonated next to their convoy.

The violence would continue without respite. Nearly 200 Iraqis were killed
in just 48 hours in a series of suicide bombings in Baghdad on Sept. 14 and
15.

On the evening of Sept. 17, a Saturday, insurgents used a remote control
device to detonate a car bomb in a crowded marketplace on the outskirts of
Baghdad.
At least 30 people were killed. A dozen Americans, including a State
Department aide and eight soldiers, were killed in a series of attacks from
the 19th
through the 23rd of September.

And so on.

The president who slept through the early days of the agony in New Orleans
is sleepwalking through the never-ending agony in Iraq. During an appearance
at a naval base in California, Mr. Bush characterized the war that he
started in Iraq as the moral equivalent of America's struggle against the
Nazis and
the Japanese in World War II.

If that's true, the entire nation should be mobilized. But, of course, it's
not true. This is a reckless, indefensible war that has been avoided like
the
plague by the children of the privileged classes.

Even the most diehard defenders of this debacle are coming to the
realization that it is doomed. So the party line now is that the Iraqis at
some point
will have to bear the burden of Mr. Bush's war alone.

Talk about a cruel joke. On the same day that Senator McCain faced off with
General Myers, more than 100 people were killed in a series of car bombs in
a town north of Baghdad; five U.S. soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb
in Ramadi; and the American general in charge of U.S. forces in Iraq, George
Casey, admitted before the Armed Services Committee that only 1 of the Iraqi
Army's 86 battalions was capable of fighting the insurgency without American
help.

The American death toll in Iraq is fast approaching 2,000. If the public
could see the carnage close up, the way it saw the horror of New Orleans,
the outrage
would be beyond belief.

You never want to say that brave troops died for the mindless fantasies spun
by a gang of dissembling, inept politicians. But what else did they die for?

And what about all those men and women, some of them barely out of
childhood, who are lying awake nights, hardly able to move their broken,
burned and paralyzed
bodies? What do we tell them as they lie there, unable to curb the pain or
fight off the depression, or even begin to understand the terrible thing
that
has happened to them?

What do we tell them about this war that their country inflicted on them for
no good reason whatsoever?

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. Copyright 2005
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.