Dark Reading: What Our 'War President' Has Wrought

I did some disturbing reading over the weekend. First, there was the latest quarterly Pentagon status report [PDF] on Iraq, which revealed that "on average, nearly 80 Iraqis were killed or wounded every day... up from the previous quarter's 60 per day." There was also an increase in the number of attacks, from under 500 per week to over 600 per week. Then there was this from USA Today: "At a time when the United States has enough trouble in Iraq, Afghanistan is increasingly beginning to resemble that war." But the saddest thing I read was the LA Times reporting that Iraqis have responded to the Haditha killings with a collective shrug because, three years into the U.S. occupation, "the notion of foreign troops killing innocent civilians simply doesn't deliver much shock." As Hassan Bazzaz, a political analyst in Baghdad, told the Times: "It doesn't mean that much to hear that 20 people were killed by the Americans. Every single day people are killed and thrown in the streets, in the garbage cans. They're scared to death. They don't even have time to think about what happened in Haditha."

It was George Bush's legacy in black and white. And blood red.