Iraq: Dieing for a mistake

db: As the deaths pile up, and the terror - from every direction - continues with increasing vigour, few could honestly say that US/UK policy in Iraq has been a success - in terms of promoting the wellbeing of Iraqis. All talk of "staying the course until we bring freedom to the Iraqi people" is window dressing. The US will get out when it has achieved it's strategic objectives - not necessarily inclusive of a stable Iraq - and not the objectives that they originaly set themselves in the dreamy days of sunshine when this debacle was planned. It's just a question of time until the US has achieved it's bottom line - be it economic or strategic - and then the struggle of "bringing freedom to the Iraqi people" will magically be over - the US having met the new xyz criteria Bush intends to meet at the time to allow him to pull some/most/all (?) of the troops out of Iraq with heads held high etc

How do you ask the last man,women,child to die for a mistake?

Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry, 1971 to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations April 23, 1971

...Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.

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 die 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 die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?...
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