kirktastic

So I’m better now. I had this flu-like-food-poison-or-something thing going for the past few days. I was happy to find this morning I was didn’t feel like throwing up and was actually hungry. Yay me!

It is Memorial Day weekend which is the “unofficial start of summer”. Memorial Day started as a way to honor the war dead. In the War on Terror with its post-combat operations in Iraq [remember, the major combat operations in Iraq ended on April 30, 2003], nearly 2,500 US soldiers have died and nearly 17,000 others have come back with missing limbs or other serious injuries.

My heart goes out to the families of those who have died or wounded in that stupid senseless war. The fact that the US invaded Iraq in 2003 isn’t their fault. The blame lies entirely on the Bush Administration and those who put him into power.

I saw Baghdad ER last weekend on HBO. It is about the military hospital in Baghdad where the injured soldiers go. I was struck by the professionalism and camaraderie of the doctors, medical staff and the wounded soldiers. No one wanted to be there but everyone was working to save life and limb. The film shows things you don’t see on the evening news. The injured soldiers. There is graphic footage of the wounds from the IEDs. I mean graphic. The site of seeing a mangled limb being cut from a soldier makes me cry. To see the discarded limb being placed into a medical waste bag is unnerving. That shouldn’t have happened. The soldier shouldn’t have been in Iraq. He should still have his arm.

So between the bbq and the beer and the sales, take a minute to remember there are thousands of soldiers in Iraq right now fighting an war that can’t be won for a cause the president lied about. Someday there may be freedom and democracy in Iraq. But that will happen on their schedule, not on presidente Bush’s schedule. Now the country is lawless and in a civil war. We’re talking about a lawless place where wearing shorts is punishable by immediate death. Until the Iraqi people are ready to deal with that, there’s nothing the US can do to help. So in the meantime, you’ll see that counter continue to tick until a leader in the US comes to have the courage to send the troops home and admit we fucked up.