Cost of War

I don't care how tough you are, if you don't feel like breaking down and crying after watching this, you aren't human. Bill Moyers knows how to put the cost of this war into context perfectly.

Watch it @ PBS: Bill Moyers Journal

It's too easy to go about your day to day life and never think about this if it doesn't directly affect you. That's the problem. Hardly anybody I know my age seems to give a rats ass about what goes on in the world they live in, outside of their own personal bubble. (Because there's no draft)

I have a cousin in Iraq and I worry about him everyday. It's hard to imagine how difficult this is for him, and his family and friends.

I just want every single one of our brave men and women back home safe and sound, that's all. We've given them a 'democratic' government, we've taken down Saddam's regime, what else does Bush want? What are we still doing there? The Iraqi parliament that we helped establish wants us to begin withdrawing, the American people want us to begin withdrawing, the WHOLE WORLD wants us to begin withdrawing. What's the hold up? I think it's two things: irrational fear and pride. The president doesn't want foreign policy 'failure' to be his lasting legacy. Too bad it was a failure to begin with. It's going to be a nearly impossible task to regain our legitimacy around the globe after this 8 year major screw up.

There would be at least a million more young men and women willing to serve this country in the military if we all had a little more confidence in the decision making skills, and cost-benefit analysis of the supposedly 'wise' and 'experienced' leaders who run our government. The survival of a volunteer military in a democracy is dependent on it's own perception of competence and effectiveness among it's citizenry. Recruitment levels are lower and lower every year. Maybe that's why our national guard is half way across the world fighting in the desert of some other nation.

America voted for George Bush twice (not really, but hey... look who's somehow still in the white house)... we didn't vote for #($&-ups like George Tenet or Paul Wolfowitz or Donald Rumsfeld or 'Brownie' or Rice or Gonzalez. These are the people who blundered on the lead up to 9/11. They're the ones who tainted the evidence on wmd's, and outed a deep undercover spy in Iran, and left Iraq's cities and facilities in chaos after the invasion. They continue to give us fresh headlines everyday about their corruption and mismanagement of nearly every agency within the federal government. Maybe Bush isn't an idiot... maybe he's just a horrible judge of character. I still think he's both.

It's different, reading about the war in newspapers and blogs. Actually seeing and hearing the reality of it in a video clip forces you to confront it on a deeper level. Anyways, it's better than me just rambling on and on, ranting about the war, and bush, and the religious right and 'spirituality'.

Here's the clip again (<--- for the computer illiterate, click on that)