Bush & the Mathematics of War: 4000, 1 million, 2 million

So passes what the U.S. media brazenly call a milestone: the 4000th dead U.S. soldier in the war against, and occupation of, Iraq. I cannot grieve more than the family and loved ones of each of those 4000. Nor certainly approach the agony and world-hurling destruction of a society where hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, are dead by airborne bomb, munitions shell, bullet, plague, beheading, chemical attack, human suicide bomb, and all the ways a human being can ponder in rending the body and soul of another human being to his or her final destiny.

The U.S. president, George W. Bush, has "vowed":

...so long as I'm president to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain, that in fact there is an outcome that will merit the sacrifice"...

He, of course, means that the superprofits from exploitation of oil will be assured to the ruling class he serves. That the influence of the American bankers, industrialists, and its military machine, will not be subjected to the imprecations and influence of some smaller, merely nationalist entity, nor to the competitive combines of larger, more powerful nation states, such as France or Germany or China. As the largest child stands on the top of the hill, surveying the carnage of his peers who lie in the dust about him, Bush swears the sacrifice worth it. Except the analogy is flawed, as he is not the bloodied king of the hill, but the thoroughly corrupt leader of a government that lost its way in the labryinth of imperial lust a long time ago.

In American history, one would have to go back to the days of Tom Paine, to find a pen that could write with sufficient disgust, and with honor for the inherent dignity of humankind, of the kind of empire-building and blood-curdling talk of sacrifice of these new monarchs, self-satisfied rulers of America, who send young men and women to fight their greedy and arrogant wars.

Can we possibly suppose that if governments had originated in a right principle, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition we have seen it? What inducement has the farmer, while following the plough, to lay aside his peaceful pursuit, and go to war with the farmer of another country? or what inducement has the manufacturer? What is dominion to them, or to any class of men in a nation? Does it add an acre to any man's estate, or raise its value? Are not conquest and defeat each of the same price, and taxes the never-failing consequence? — Though this reasoning may be good to a nation, it is not so to a government. War is the Faro-table of governments, and nations the dupes of the game.

And the pawns of war are its refugees. In Iraq, the "success" of Bush's martial "surge" is belied by the attitude of the millions of refugees that previously fled the carnage imposed by the U.S. invasion and the resultant ethnic cleansing, as the U.S. maneuvered between the warring factions of a shattered society.

DAMASCUS, Syria: The much-heralded stream of Iraqi refugees back home to Iraq from Syria has slowed to a trickle, with many fearing that life in their homeland is still too dangerous despite improvements in security....

"To think of returning to Iraq is as bad as thinking of suicide," said Faten al-Samerrai, 42, who has been living in Damascus since 2006 with her husband and five children. "There is no future and no life in Iraq. There is only ruin."

She said life is not perfect in Damascus — but at least it's safe....

"I lost my son and my husband because of America," said Ikhlas al-Duleimi, a 36-year-old Sunni Muslim Iraqi in Syria. She added: "I wish Saddam's awful regime would return."

And so the great sacrifice of Bush comes full circle to the idealization of a tyrant that his own country put into power, deposed, and now restores to martyrdom. And this "noble" cause, this Iraq War of the Republicans and their Democratic Party enablers, claims its 4000th American corpse. The Iraqi bodies are not even counted by Bush and his government. That sacrifice might overwhelm the flimsy temple Bush is building for his unholy war.