Thursday, June 15, 2006

US military death toll in Iraq reaches 2,500

And tens of thousands of Iraqis, of course, but who's counting. (Certainly not George W.)

But wait! Progress is being made... Iraq Bad Guy Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi's successor has been revealed. (Naturally... gotta have a Bad Guy!) Now it's a simple matter of spending 3 years (and who knows how many lives) to find him and drop a couple of bombs on him. (And the one after him...and the one after him... etc.)

This kind of news makes me tired, not just because it makes stability in that region seem so impossible, but because the news itself is so contrived. The truth is, the US with all their high-tech equipment could have taken Zarqawi out years ago. But they needed a Bad Guy, and Zarqawi fit the bill, especially when he started chopping heads off and posting the videos all over the web. America, with all its power, couldn't isolate the source of these videos? Come on.

As the US mid-term elections approached and Bush's poll numbers sank, something clearly had to be done. So Zarqawi was given his final role in the play and voila! Polls went up a little. Bush paid a 6-hour visit to Iraq and bingo! Up a little more. A positive trend at last.

And now nobody's talking about Haditha anymore.