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Volume CCXXXIV, Number 41   January, 2004    Worcester, Massachusetts    Since 1770

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The Casualty List: At Least It's Not Arms and Legs By Hawkeye Pierce Combat Medical Correspondent. You wouldn't know it from the jolly pictures on Schlox News Network or the happy talk from Bush Administration apologists, but the endless Iraqi war has generated more than dead GI's. There's plenty of wounded, too. Why is that, you ask. The news department of The Washington Post had an answer for that too in its November 29 editions: "The number of soldiers treated for serious combat injuries is not publicly disclosed." Hey, that's top secret, buddy. If you want the casualty list, sue Dick Cheney. Anyway, it's not a numbers game. It's the kind of wounds we care about. On that score, the Post said: The worst that Maj. Michael Hilliard, 33, an emergency physician, saw back home in San Antonio were car crash and gunshot victims. Here, he estimates that he has treated the broken bodies of more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers. "The injuries are horrific," he said. "They are beyond anything that you see in a textbook, and they are the worst that I have ever seen." Never mind then. Just be glad that Freddie and Tom don't have to sacrifice their children for the war they promoted so fervently from the relative safety of the their editorial and op-ed pages. In George Bush's America, only the poor kids leave body parts behind in Tikrit.

By Henry Cabot Lodge
Spy Foreign Service

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Who could fail to be stirred by the George Bush Victory Tour, relocated from the flight deck of the Abraham Lincoln to a well-guarded Army base somewhere on the grounds of the disused Baghdad International Airport?

Certainly this old correspondent's blood was stirred by Bush strutting in triumph from one end of the mess hall to the other. Who could forget his thrilling motorcade through the streets of Baghdad to the adoring cheers of the liberated Iraqis? Sadly, the victory tour had to be cut short so the Presidential 747 could depart before fedayeen could adjust the sights on their Stingers.

So maybe there were only 2,500 square feet of Baghdad secure enough for Bush to prance for the cameras, at least between sunset and sunrise. Nothing can take the shine off of his great victory.

Nothing, except his increasingly desperate effort to dash out the emergency exit before he has to face the voters in November. Can't expect Katherine Harris to fix the vote in all 50 states, after all.

His henchmen have made it clear that they intend to turn over the keys to what his father once described as the prison of Iraq by next June to a duly constituted Iraqi government. Just one problem: the Iraqis, like the Florida Supreme Court, won't buy Bush's idea of how to constitute that government. Bush, who claims incessantly that his triumph has brought democracy to Iraq, is deathly afraid of an outbreak of any such democracy.

But why should we tell the sad story, when the Washington Post, one of the great cheerleaders for the Bush meatgrinder, does it so much better:

BAGHDAD, Nov. 27 – Less than two weeks after overhauling its plans for Iraq's political transition, the Bush administration is considering more major revisions that could include elections for a provisional government in an attempt to appease the country's most powerful Shiite Muslim cleric, senior U.S. officials said.

Bush, having stepped on every land mine on the road to Iraq and ruin, has finally been blown to bits by the non-improvised explosive device that everyone else in the world, including his otherwise-clueless father, knew was lurking just under the asphalt.

The majority of Iraqi citizens are Shi'ite Muslims. Therefore, a free election would surely lead to a Shi'ite mullocracy. The Sunnis and Kurds, no fans of the black-turbanned imams, would respond to such a government by seceding, probably into separate states.

The next step would be a bloody civil war, in which Iran would intervene on the side of the Shi'as and Turkey would march into Kurdistan. That leaves the Sunnis, whose pacific nature is clear to the meanest intelligence.

For these reasons, American proconsul Jerry Bremer had been seeking to hold elections approximately on or about the 12th of Never. Or as Tom Lehrer, singing of an earlier generation of clueless imperialists, put it:

Property protected, all their rights respected
Until someone we like can be elected

Bremer's plan was to install a puppet government through some combination of "caucuses" and Pentagon stooges like Chalabi. It sounded good to Bush, Cheney, Rice and their coat-holders in Washington, but no one told the Shia. The Post picks up the story:

But the senior officials said the administration may be forced to organize elections to satisfy Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. . . .

"We were surprised that Sistani did not bless the plan," another senior administration official said. "We're waiting to see what he says. If he says no to the caucuses, then we have to figure out a way to get elections done. . . ."
"Elections are now a possibility," said a senior U.S. official close to Iraq's political transition. "We're scrambling to find a solution."

The revisions under consideration illustrate the challenge the administration faces as it attempts to craft a political blueprint for Iraq that satisfies the country's diverse religious and ethnic groups while attempting to ensure U.S. influence over the new government and an end to the civil occupation before the presidential election next year. . . .

"Will it work?" a senior administration official said. "Something's got to work. June 30 is turnover day, which is when Iraqis will have full authority and power, and nothing's going to change that."

Gosh, if only someone had explained this to Freddie Hiatt last year.

While the Bush team writes the sequel to that great Nixon/Kissinger hit, Peace with Honor, the rest of us can contemplate the dreary choice that the Bush Administration has bequeathed to us: a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops leading to a bloody and destabilizing civil war or an apparently endless commitment of U.S. blood and money in a country whose loathing for us grows with each passing day. Iraq has become America's Roach Motel: the U.S. Army can check in, but checking out will be a sticky business.