The last few days as I’ve been driving around experiencing what I call my “quiet time,” time to contemplate everything from my own spirituality to the issues of the day that seem to drive my posts on this so-called blog, I can’t seem to get it off my mind that there’s still an illegal occupation going on in Iraq. We have somewhere close to 140,000 troops still in “harm’s way,” and there are close to 200,000 mercenaries – usually referred to as “contractors” – on the US payroll participating in this occupation. The one thing that is clear about the Iraqi and American populations, the one thing they have in common, is that they don’t want the American troops in Iraq anymore. Of course, the multi-national corporations who wanted this “war” in the first place and the politicians who do their bidding, would like this occupation to go on indefinitely. I’m sure the prospect that the United States is not going to control the Iraqi oil reserves after we “leave” is very unsettling to GW Bush and his associates, but I digress.

As I was driving home tonight after a meeting with some friends I heard a quote from a member of NPR, a black journalist named Juan Williams, who stated that the Iraqi people don’t appreciate all we’ve done for them. It’s statements like that from members of the supposed “Main Stream media” that just drive me nuts. These guys are speaking to untold millions of Americans and unfortunately many people assume they have a clue about what they’re saying. I don’t know if they say stuff like this on purpose, or if they really just are “lazy” as some have pointed out and don’t do the research necessary to make competent remarks. Now, I realize that one could just say that I just have a difference of opinion with Mr. Williams, but the evidence to the contrary is so overwhelming that I believe either these people believe the propoganda they’ve been fed by the Bush administration (that in itself, in my mind, would be heresy for a reporter that has any kind of integrity) or they’re part of the propoganda “machine” on purpose. Either way is bad and represents, to me, why this nation is in danger of being reduced to an after thought on the world “stage.”

I’m going to start my explanation of why this type of reporting bothers me so by saying people are STILL dying every day in Iraq due to the conflict that we essentially set ablaze. It’s true that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, but the world is full of tyrants in societies that we don’t understand. What Saddam did was provide a bit of stability in one of the most unstable parts of the world. Since “Mission Accomplished” we have lost over 4000 troops in Iraq and the last count I heard put the Iraqi death toll at over 600,000 and maybe as high as a million – far worse than anything Saddam ever did to his people. The reason the figures are estimates is because our press has basically stopped reporting on the war. Our economy is in the tank and therefore the Iraq war is no longer front page news. Our so-called main stream media has evidently bought into the idea that the “surge” worked and we’re “winning” in Iraq. To me, this is almost beyond absurd and it is evidence as to how much our media is controlled by members of the Bush administration. This lull in “news” is allowing Bush, Cheney, and others to try to rewrite history as they exit Washington and it gives the republican “attack machine” time to regroup and prepare itself to attack President-Elect Obama as he pulls our troops out – presumably with the idea of blaming him for the US “losing” this war.

Well, we lost this war the day we started it. The statistics are so overwhelming as to the folly of this action that it is amazing to me that as a nation we have allowed our media to manipulate the reality of what has happened. I’ll just lay it out briefly: First, as stated above, over 4000 of our best men and women have given their lives for an act of adventurism by a group of politicians who have profited handsomely from the fiasco – that is treason in itself – war profiteering (by the accounts I’ve read both Cheney and Rumsfeld over $100 million a piece as of about 4 years into the “war” – just to mention a couple of the culprits). Secondly, tens of thousands of our troops have been injured to varying degrees and are receiving abominable care once back in the states. The Bush administration didn’t even support the GI Bill that was passed by the recent Democratic Congress as a belated act to demonstrate REAL support for our troops. Thirdly, close to a million Iraqi’s are dead from this occupation (as previously mentioned) and subsequent insurgency (remember – we unleashed the insurgency so don’t blame it on the Iraqi’s), and estimates are that 4 million Iraqi’s have been externally displaced – meaning they are outside of the country and another 2 million are internally displaced – meaning inside the country’s boundaries, but out of their homes and communities. Combining these three groups with the million or two Iraqi’s wounded gives you approximately one-third of the Iraq population either dead, wounded, or displaced from this “war.”

I don’t know how you could make any kind of a claim for “victory” with statistics like that staring you in the face (remember, we’re supposed to be defending Iraq). But wait, it gets better (or worse depending on your perspective – I have a tendency toward sarcasm): The United States military has been stretched so thin that it is literally “reeling” from almost 6 years of “quagmire” in this nation full of people who have hated each other for thousands of years and are going to continue hating each other long after we leave. This war has been a catalyst to the near bankruptcy (or bankruptcy depending on how you look at that) of our nation’s economy – exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted when he attacked the World Trade Center on 9/11. Remember bin Laden, well, he’s still at large and in fact maybe even stronger than when he originally attacked us. We couldn’t have done him a bigger favor than to get “bogged down” in Iraq. His goal was to get us “bogged down” in Afganistan, but we actually were about to capture him and put an end to al Qaeda when Bush/Cheney “took their eyes off the ball” and pulled our resources out of Afganistan and put them in Iraq. It’s almost as if they were thinking what’s best for Osama – unbelievable to me – yet our media is still talking about “victory” in Iraq – because they can’t get beyond the lying propoganda machine of the republican party and the Bush administration.

Worse still, we have made Iran a “player” on the world stage. Just what all our “friends” feared in the middle east was a resurgent Iran, and the end result of our occupation in Iraq will be some kind of unification of the Shia in Iraq with the Shia government of Iran. I realize that many people point out that the Iraqi’s hate the Iranians, but I firmly believe that theory stems from the fact that Iraq’s Sunni minority has ruled the country for years and the real “divide” is a Sunni/Shia divide that will ultimately put the Shia in Iraq and Iran in control of the largest oil reserves in the world (a combination of the reserves of the two countries). Additionally, with a resurgent al Qaeda and an empowered Shia Iraq/Iran the possibility of more conflict in the middle east is measurably higher not lower – and we are therefore less safe and not more safe as some in the Bush administration and the media would have us believe. I’m sure the monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and other countries along with the dictatorial countries which are allied with us are not feeling too stable at this moment.

This gets me back to the comments of Juan Williams that the Iraqi’s don’t appreciate what we’ve done for them. Well, that just isn’t too surprising. In fact there aren’t many Americans left who appreciate what we’ve done for them. At this point most Americans are settling in with the reality that it will take years to undo the damage from this invasion, if we can somehow manage to do it – I mean what is it going to take to “fix” Iraq? I don’t know – one third of the country is dead, wounded, or displaced – that is HUGE! And I haven’t even brought up the damage to the infrastructure. Our occupation has certainly not solved the Sunni/Shia problem and we can’t stay there until all the “bad guys” have been killed or imprisoned. OUR OCCUPATION HAS DESTROYED THEIR COUNTRY AND IT’S DESTROYING OURS! It would be nice if people like Williams would do their “homework” and tell the truth to the American people so that we can move on in an appropriate manner. Quite naturally, if we don’t hold the “culprits” who orchestrated this abomination accountable it will make forgiveness by Iraqi’s to Americans even more difficult – but it’s not hard at all to understand why the Iraqi’s wouldn’t appreciate what we’ve done for them – IT IS UNIMAGINABLE! Comments such as those by Juan Williams makes it clear to me that without a free, courageous, and responsible press the United States is becoming a second rate nation!