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http://snipurl.com/15v23 The Revengers: Why it matters that more Americans have died in Iraq than on 9/11 REVENGE. Hold on to that thought. Go to bed thinking it. Wake up chanting it. Because nothing less than revenge is called for today. -- Philadelphia Daily News, lead editorial, Sept. 12, 2001. Those words have haunted me ever since I first read them on a bleary-eyed morning, hardly recovered from a long and gut-wrenching day as an American parent and as a journalist trying to make sense of the mayhem of 9/11 from afar. I had written the main news story for the Daily News that ran in the same newspaper I was now holding, the one with a shameless headline that screamed "Blood for Blood." In my own piece, I had written these words, that "America would never be the same again." Although proved right, I had only the vaguest idea what I was talking about when I wrote that on a Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, I knew. Revenge. It is driven by the most basic and understandable of human emotions, and it comes straight from the blood-red sinews of the heart. It is the voice of the people, of the man on the street. But revenge does not come from the head. And when it becomes the voice not of the man in the street but the man in the big office, whether it be a glass newspaper office or the Oval Office, then a society -- our society -- is in big, big trouble. What comes from the head is a quest for justice -- revenge's smarter and better-looking first cousin -- and the true strength that comes from a response that is powerful and yet proportional. Is is what can -- and has -- made a nation like America great. But sure enough, we watched America slide into an abyss not long after the ink on those wrongheaded words -- "Revenge. Hold onto that thought." -- had dried. Within weeks, our government had publicly violated the spirit of our nation's founding with the Orwellian-named Patriot Act, while doing even worse in secret, with new and unlawful kinds of domestic spying, and with plans for torture and for suspending habeas corpus already underway in the bowels of the West Wing. But when it came to 9/11 and revenge, Iraq was where the rubber really met the road. No, I don't think that revenge is not the only reason we invaded Iraq -- how could it be, thrown into an intense caldron that includes the desire of a small band of so-called thinkers for American world dominance, the quest for oil and billion-dollar defense allocations, and our growing deference to neighbor Saudi Arabia? -- but it has always bubbled loudly on the surface of our Great Misadventure there. After all, revenge was never far from the mind of Oedipally-wrecked George W. Bush, who wanted to finish the job in Iraq that his father had not, nor from his minions like Donald Rumsfeld, who wrote on the afternoon of Sept. 12: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Over the next 19 months, the Bush administration would conflate 9/11 and Iraq many times, as Bush did in this statement from his 2003 State of the Union address: "Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses, and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other planes -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." Meanwhile, more and more Americans came to think that Saddam Hussein or Iraq hijackers (there were none) had something to do with 9/11, and millions did exactly what that Daily News editorial had asked of them, and held the thought of revenge. Listen to what one American told the Christian Science Monitor in March 2003: In Selma, Ala., firefighter Thomas Wilson supports going to war with Iraq, and brings up Sept. 11 himself, saying we don't know who's already here in the US waiting to attack. When asked what that has to do with Iraq, he replies: "They're all in it together - all of them hate this country." The reason: "prosperity." There's a jarring moment in Bruce Springsteen's post-Vietnam masterpiece, "Born in the USA," when the narrator states that he was sent far away "to go and kill the yellow man." It is an unspoken truth of Iraq: How many of our soldiers, brave and well-intentioned, nonetheless see the military part of their mission in Iraq as to "go and kill the Arab man," i.e., the perpetrator of 9/11? Consider this anecdote, involving the father of one of the 2,973 people who was murdered on 9//11: Sekzer watched as the Twin Towers were engulfed in flames and black smoke. He knew his son, Jason, was inside -- and sensed that his child would die. A Vietnam veteran and 35-year law enforcement officer, Sekzer believed his president and vice president when they said that Iraq somehow was behind the 9/11 attack and he supported the Iraq invasion. He launched a successful campaign to get the military to write Jason Sekzer's name on a bomb dropped on Baghdad -- a tribute he'd learned back in Vietnam. The military even sent him a photo of the weapon before launching it: ``In Loving Memory of Jason Sekzer,'' it said. That was three years ago. You don't know how people have died in Iraq since this war -- ill-conceived in the flaming embers of 9/11 -- and neither do I, not if you also try to tally the tens upon tens of thousands of Iraqis who died just because they went to a market on a wrong day, or because they live on the wrong side of a street. We do know this: That 2,980 American troops have died in Iraq since March 2002, the vast majority in combat. And so a major news story -- and thus a major controversy -- today has been that the U.S. death toll for the Iraq war has now surpassed the 2,973 known victims of 9/11. It is, to many, a grand metaphor and tragic irony, and the easiest way to say it is that in order to prevent another 9/11, the Bush administration has instead caused one of its own. Except reality is a lot messier than that. Statistically, it's too simplistic. The 2,980 Iraq casualty number only includes American soldiers who died, and not several hundred British troops or soldiers from allies of the United States, while the 2,973 9/11 death figure does include British and other nationals. The Iraq death toll doesn't include a number of American contractors or journalists who found their way to Iraq because of the invasion, and who died as a result. And it also takes no account for the thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, many of whom most resemble our 9/11 victims, in that they were good and hard-working people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Also, if the Iraq war was wrong and immoral from Day One, as I and many Americans believe, then the casualty number that matters the most is 1, because one is too many to die for a mistake. And frankly, it all gets intellectually tangled when you try to compare a one-day terrorist attack, which deliberately targeted civilians in a way that any civilized human should find repulsive, with three and a half years of combat and collateral damage. Tangled -- and yet I do believe in my gut that the killing fields in Iraq flow directly from the senseless violence of 9/11, and so I believe that stories and blog posts that compare the death tolls are worthwhile -- because for one day they make us think, a little harder and a little more out loud than usual, what Americans should be thinking every single day. Just what in God's name are we doing over there? You don't need a Ph.D. in geopolitics to understand that revenge never works as a foreign policy -- just go to Blockbuster and rent the DVD of "Goodfellas" or "The Godfather" trilogy, and watch one lethal act, or one mistake, lead to an exponential increase in dead bodies. And yet it is revenge for 9/11 that has been driven and exploited and driven and exploited in an endless cycle to justify a loss of life that is now greater. And yet what should be our real guiding principles go unfulfilled. Justice has not been achieved -- Osama bin Laden and his aides are still at large, and those who have been captured have not been brought to trial. Nor has safety and self-defense been truly realized, since our actions in Iraq have driven away would-be allies around the globe, and created a new and larger generations of anti-Americans from Peshawar to North London. And so yes, the numeral 2,973 did matter in Iraq. It should be tattooed on the American brain as what can go wrong when a great nation of the world gives itself over to the lowest instincts of mankind. Revenge. It's been 1,933 days, and 2,980 American souls. Can we let it go now? _____________________________ Note: This message comes from the peace-justice-news e-mail mailing list of articles and commentaries about peace and social justice issues, activism, etc. If you do not regularly receive mailings from this list or have received this message as a forward from someone else and would like to be added to the list, send a blank e-mail with the subject "subscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or you can visit: http://lists.enabled.com/mailman/listinfo/peace-justice-news Go to that same web address to view the list's archives or to unsubscribe. E-mail accounts that become full, inactive or out of order for more than a few days will become disabled or deleted from this list. FAIR USE NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the information in this e-mail is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. 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