[Peace] 2000 too many

[Morton K. Brussel]

I suggest we make a flyer of the statement below, although I have  
problems with the notion of honoring the soldiers who died in Iraq;  
can one honor their sense of duty and dedication to an ugly cause?  
What do others think?
--mkb

Published on Tuesday, October 25, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
2000 Too Many
by Medea Benjamin and Gayle Brandeis

Think back to the end of 1999. Millions of people were afraid of the  
coming New Year. 2000. Y2K. People were afraid that power would fail,  
that bombs would be unleashed at random, that chaos would reign in  
the streets. As it turned out, though, nothing much happened.  
Midnight struck, the calendar clicked over to a new year, a new  
decade, a new century, a new (some would say) millennium, and life  
went on as normal.

Now we have reached another 2000. Iraq 2K. Two thousand of our  
soldiers killed in Iraq. Our administrative power has failed; bombs  
are being unleashed, seemingly at random; chaos is reigning in the  
streets of Iraq and our global relationships have been torn asunder.  
This is the 2000 we should be afraid of. This is the 2000 we must  
grieve, honor and reflect upon.

This 2000 wouldn't have happened without the year 2001. Without 9/11.  
Those numbers gave our president the false justification to begin  
this war. Some 3000 Americans were killed on the attacks of September  
11. Now almost 2/3 that number have been killed in Iraq. And that's  
not counting soldiers who have died after leaving Iraq, died from  
horrendous wounds and tormented suicides. It doesn't count soldiers  
who are left permanently disabled or those who survived in body but  
not in spirit, the broken souls whose lives have been shattered by  
what they did and saw.

And of course, that's not counting the uncounted, the Iraqis. We'll  
never know how many Iraqis have been killed at checkpoints, how many  
were caught in crossfires, how many were killed by roadside bombs.  
We'll never know how many Iraqi babies have died because of unclean  
drinking water from bombed out water systems, how many sick Iraqis  
died because hospitals were looted of critical equipment, how many  
Iraqis died because so many doctors have fled the country. Some say  
tens of thousands; others, like the survey in the medical journal,  
Lancet, say over 100,000. We don't know; we'll never know.

The Bush administration insists we must "stay the course" to help the  
Iraqi people. But a national survey conducted in August by an Iraqi  
university research team for the British Ministry of Defense found 82  
percent of Iraqis "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition  
troops; less than one per cent of the population believes coalition  
forces are responsible for any improvement in security, and 67 per  
cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation.

But why should we expect the Bush administration to listen to the  
Iraqis, when they don't even listen to their own constituents? Since  
the summer of 2005, polls consistently show that a majority of  
Americans oppose this war, think it's unwinnable, think it makes us  
less safe at home and want a timetable for troop withdrawal. How many  
of our soldiers need to die before our elected officials start  
listening to us?

The grim milestone of the death of the 2000th American soldier should  
be a time for national reflection. As the families of our soldiers  
know all too well, 2000 is not just a number. These are 2000 human  
beings we've lost; 2000 people with names, with grieving families;  
2000 people with hopes and dreams that will never be realized.

Let's honor them by stopping more soldiers from dying. Let's honor  
them by giving Iraqis a chance to run their own country. Let's honor  
them by bringing their buddies home.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and  
Global Exchange. Gayle Brandeis, also with CODEPINK, is the author of  
The Book of Dead Birds, which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction in  
Support of a Literature of Social Change.
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