Link of the Day

I think I've posted this before, but The Fainter reminded me of it last night and so here's the link again as a refresher: The Cost of the War in Iraq.

Honestly, it makes me crazy that I was so against this war in the first place, that I didn't even vote for George W. Bush, and now I'm stuck not only with paying the tab, but also with the dismay and horror I feel at looking events on the ground. Nothing is going to bring back the 40,000 to 45,000 Iraqi civillians that have been killed or the nearly 3,000 US soldiers who have been killed, and for all that, what have we gained? Secretary Rice says it's the birth of the new Middle East, but is it really a Middle East we want? One where America is pretty much hated, where our actions are active recruitment posters for Al-Qaeda?

I simply cannot understand, how anyone with a sense of history, can even think we're safer today than we were before 9/11. Perhaps in terms of air safety, but please. AQ's terrorists are like mushrooms -- one of them gets lopped off, and there are more than a dozen to take his or her place and as long as we refuse to look and attempt to fix the underlying problems that contribute to terrorism, (not Cheney or Bush though, please -- they've 'fixed' enough) and if we never try to talk to the people directly sponsoring terrorism (hello Syria, Iran), we're never going to win this battle with guns and bombs. They've got more people on their side willing to die for the promise of 72 virgins in heaven than we can even imagine. As someone on Slashdot said long ago: "The beauty... of a war on an abstract concept is that the concept never surrenders and the war never ends..."