Unasked Questions

July 23 2004
Counterbias.com
Cory M. Marshall

As this is written, 896, 900 American service members have been killed as a result of operations in Iraq .  How is it possible to discern this figure?  It is as simple as pointing and clicking, and of course, trusting in the good graces of the United States ’ government, its military and their collective willingness to be open and forthright.

Is there any reason to doubt that these 896 900 people, whose deaths are bifurcated between combat and non-combat, represent the totality of American fatalities actually?  Or do they merely officially?  Does this figure, then, include those who died on scene as well as those unfortunates whisked away on a faint pulse and a hope only to pass later?

Notwithstanding the “Great WMD Swindle” and the mountain of garbage paddled by the various members of the coalition of the shilling, there is very little about the crowd currently defecating in the Potomac that suggests reliability, even honesty.  From the seemingly innocuous revisions of job numbers and other economic indicators, and the more blatant restating of terrorist figures, there is clearly a pattern of well-satisfied expectation of another shoe dropping with a significant amount of the official pronouncements.

This seems to work nicely with a pattern of rhetoric that shoots big, leaves a trail of waste and has maybe enough left over after wars and war tools to accomplish very little.  All the areas that are neglected – some children left behind, sort of clear skies – are never so important as some offensive body part or someone else’s peccadilloes or rituals, or any combination thereof, to the point where the obfuscation and outright lying seem trifling.  And if worry over who’s what went where fails to impress there is always some specious and vacuous alert about possibly imminent peril to couple with the All-American exhortation to go shopping to rally the counter-terror forces of retail.

Always there come optimistic pronouncements that are dashed a few days or so later and reward the cynics for their faith.  It seems that the more hideous the truth, the later it is revealed and it is often much worse than what is broadly known and emphatically promised.  At one point, legitimacy was promised and that never materialized, seeming ever further with each woeful revelation or savage, new allegation.

In the end, a series of deliberate manipulations and outright lies is festering its way to light and scrutiny, but it has left a hideous pile of corpses of untold Iraqis and 896, 900 service members.  The only thing that would be worse would be untold Iraqis and more than 896, 900 service members killed.  When government is so parsimonious with the facts, one must be pardoned to wonder.  However, it is less clear whether one should be pardoned for not wondering – Mr. Bush, himself, so infamously yet awkwardly extolling one and all to never be fooled again.

It is difficult to find any major musings on the subject which leads to the conclusion that in the face of all the number games that get played in the Beltway, the whole litany of lies, one thing is clear.  Some intuitive understanding of this enterprise’s modus operandi makes for a little less curiosity to find out if the figure 896, 900 reflects actuality.  Less curious still will be a public ready to be scarred by the shrieks of little boys being raped by grown men in American uniforms.

        Four more years?