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Tomorrow marks the 5th anniversary of Bush's war with Iraq. The costs:

• 3990 US soldiers dead That is more than 2 per day.
• 20,416 US soldiers wounded (badly enough to require air transport). That's more than 11 per day.
• At least 82,240 civilians killed. That's 45 a day and only includes deaths that get reported in the media. One study puts the civilian death toll much, much higher.
• $503 billion. That's 275 million dollars a day, and it doesn't include future obligations, such as veteran's health care. (Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that the war has already cost 3 trillion dollars.)

The blood of 2 soldiers and $275 million down the drain today and tomorrow and the day after.... With no end in sight.

Our elected representatives seem uninterested in stopping this war, but these candidates for the US House of Representatives have a responsible plan to end the war. It is remarkably sane and it is the only glimmer of hope I've had in a long time.

Bruce Springsteen, on Iraq, 2007:

Who?ll be the last to die for a mistake
The last to die for a mistake
Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break
Who?ll be the last to die for a mistake

John Kerry, on Vietnam, 1971:

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to dies so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to dies in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Don't miss this elegant and powerful anti-war essay by Garret Keizer in Harper's Magazine. It is about despair and action and a quixotic call for a US general strike on election day, November 6th, 2007.

The opening resonates strongly for me:

Of all the various depredations of the Bush regime, none has been so thorough as its plundering of hope. Iraq will recover sooner. What was supposed to have been the crux of our foreign policy?a shock-and-awe tutorial on the utter futility of any opposition to the whims of American power?has achieved its greatest and perhaps its only lasting success in the American soul.

Another moving excerpt:

The question we need to ask ourselves at this moment is what further provocations we require to justify digging in our heels. To put the question more pointedly: Are we willing to wait until the next presidential election, or for some interim congressional conversion experience, knowing that if we do wait, hundreds of our sons and daughters will be needlessly destroyed? Another poet, C?sar Vallejo, framed the question like this:

A man shivers with cold, coughs, spits up blood. Will it ever be fitting to allude to my inner soul? . . . A cripple sleeps with one foot on his shoulder. Shall I later on talk about Picasso, of all people?

A young man goes to Walter Reed without a face. Shall I make an appointment with my barber? A female prisoner is sodomized at Abu Ghraib. Shall I send a check to the Clinton campaign?

And another:

Granted, many of us have come to find both those wars unacceptable. But do we find them intolerable? Can you sleep? Yes, doctor, I can sleep. Can you work? Yes, doctor, I can work. Do you get out to the movies, enjoy a good restaurant? Actually, I have a reservation for tonight. Then I?d say you were doing okay, wouldn?t you? I?d say you were tolerating the treatment fairly well.

Read the full essay here.

This is a letter to the editor of my local paper. Feel free to edit and send it to your paper, too!

To The Editor:

Monday, March 19th is the fourth anniversary of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. We've now fought in Iraq longer than we fought in WWII. The war has cost $410 billion. That's $280 million a day--more than the daily cost of Vietnam, adjusted for inflation. (These costs are over and above ordinary maintenance costs for the military and do not include future costs for the care of wounded veterans nor future interest payments on the borrowed money to pay for the war.) Most tragically, the war has cost the lives of more than 3,200 US soldiers. Over the last year there have been about 2.5 casualties on an average day. Every day this war continues, two or three more soldiers will die, leaving behind their wives and husbands, their mothers and fathers, their daughters and sons.

Iraq is a quagmire worse than Vietnam. In Vietnam, we knew who we were fighting: the Communists. And the Domino Theory, as flawed as it was, told us why we were fighting. In Iraq, we don't know who we're fighting: is it the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Baathists, the "insurgents", Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or some combination of them? And we don't know why we're fighting: are we trying to stop the spread of WMDs, to promote democracy, to prevent a civil war, or just because we don't know how to get out of the hole we've dug?

Please speak out. It is time to end this senseless war!

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