Put Aside the Game

While I'm as fascinated as anyone about whether Karl Rove will be indicted, all the noise about Rove tends to obscure the bigger picture. Whether Rove is frog-marched out of the White House is essentially about "the game;" that is, who wins and who loses. Politics in this country has become more and more about the game, and less and less about the issues involved.

Yes, Rove did a terrible thing in outing a covert CIA agent for political purposes, but let's not forget why he did it. He did it because this administration wanted to go to war in Iraq, regardless of any justification. Anything that contradicted the (false) picture they were painting had to be discredited. When the focus is on the game, as it always is with Rove, anything goes, because winning matters more than anything else. It doesn't matter whether Iraq really has weapons of mass destruction or not; that's about issues. What matters is, they could put together a sort of plausible picture of an Iraq with WMDs, and that would let them win the game. That eventually it would be obvious that Iraq didn't have WMDs wasn't relevant, because by that time, Rove and company would come up with something else.

The press plays right into this mindset. It's much easier to cover politics as a horse race; you don't have to understand and explain to your readers the issues involved. But we don't have to go along. Yes, Rove should resign or be fired, and I hope he's indicted for what he's done. But is it more important that Bush keep his word and fire Rove, or that he lied to us about the danger Iraq presented to us in order to lead us into a war that has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands and done nothing to make us safer?

The Human Toll?

I opened my newspaper this morning and read the paper's editorial this morning on The True Cost of War. I was struck by the first sentence in the editorial:

With 1,731 U.S. troops killed and more than 13,000 wounded, the human toll from the war in Iraq is painfully apparent.

I beg to differ: the human toll is not painfully apparent from those number. Not the human toll.

Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war range from a low of 22787 to in excess of 100,000. I know that the editorial was talking about what the war was costing us as Americans, but the true human toll of the war is only painfully apparent when you look at the deaths of all humans, not just the ones on your side. By my belief, all of those dead Iraqis were also children of God. It's probably safe to say that the vast of majority of them, while perhaps hating the US, never had any intention of coming over here to attack us.

And, of course, lest we forget, none of the terrorists who did come over and attack us were Iraqi, nor were they being harbored and trained in Iraq. Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the attack, is Saudi, as were 15 of the 19 hijackers. There has been no credible evidence of any link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The human toll doesn't end with US military casualties and Iraqi civilian casualties, either. There have been 100 deaths from other coalition partners. At least 250 US civilians have died. Iraqi military and police deaths number at least 2517.

When we talk about the human toll of this war, we should remember that American soldiers, brave though they may be, are not the only humans dying. The human toll of this war is over 25000, and climbing. What are we getting for this price?