Three Years

Protesters around the globe marked the third anniversary of our war against Iraq. In San Francisco, an estimated ten thousand people showed up to express their outrage at our continued involvement in a conflict begun (by the administration's own admission) based on faulty intelligence. In London fifteen thousand protestors showed up, down from last year's anniversary demonstration total of forty-five thousand to Trafalgar Square.
As long as we're counting, there have been 2,519 coalition deaths, 2,314 Americans, one Australian, 103 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, two Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Hungarian, 26 Italians, one Kazakh, one Latvian, 17 Poles, two Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians in the war in Iraq as of March 17, 2006, according to a CNN count. I suppose it is telling that the number of protestors still outnumber the casualties, but as the number of protestors dwindle, the number of casualties continues to rise. Meanwhile the Iraqi civilian body count (“We don’t do body counts”General Tommy Franks, US Central Command) stands somewhere betwethirtyity-three and thirty-seven thousand - these would be men, women and children.
By contrast, in Operation Enduring Freedom there have been 346 coalition deaths - 278 Americans, one Australian, five Britons, 10 Canadians, three Danes, four French, 18 Germans, three Italians, one Norwegian, one Portuguese, three Romanians, 17 Spaniards and two Swedes - in the war on terror as of March 17, 2006, according to CNN. This would be our conflict of righteous indignation. The United States is in Afghanistan to catch the bad guys who are responsible for the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001. At last count, we had rounded up a number of the henchmen, but the biggest names continue to elude us.
Pinhead in Chief G.W.B. (feel free to make up your own acronym) marked the anniversary by declaring that "We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq." He referred to the day as "the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq," without once using the word "war." Secretary of Defense (not War) Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a guest column in Sunday's editions of The Washington Post that turning away from Iraq would be "the modern equivalent of handing postwar Germany back to the Nazis."
Happy Anniversary, boys. I hope you can sleep at night.