Surging past the gates of hell

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IF29Ak01.html

By Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes, numbers can strip human beings of just about everything that makes us what we are. Numbers can silence pain, erase love, obliterate emotion, and blur individuality. But sometimes numbers can also tell a necessary story in ways nothing else can.

This January, US President George W Bush announced his "surge" plan for Iraq, which he called his "new way forward". It was, when you think about it, all about numbers. Since then, 28,500 new US troops have surged into that country, mostly in and around Baghdad; and, according to the Washington Post, there has also been a hidden surge of private armed contractors - hired guns, if you will - who free up troops by taking over many mundane military positions from guarding convoys to guarding envoys. In the meantime, other telltale numbers in Iraq have surged as well.

Now, Americans are theoretically waiting for the commander of US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, to "report" to Congress in September on the "progress" of Bush's surge strategy. But there really is no reason to wait for September. An interim report - "Iraq by the Numbers" - can be prepared now (as it could have been prepared last month, or last year). The trajectory of horror in Iraq has long been clear; the fact that the US military is a motor driving the Iraqi cataclysm has been no less clear for years now. So here is my own early version of the "September Report".

A caveat about numbers: in the bloody chaos that is Iraq, as tens of thousands die or are wounded, as millions uproot themselves or are uprooted, and as the influence of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's national government remains largely confined to the 10-square-kilometer fortified Green Zone in the Iraqi capital, numbers, even as they pour out of that hemorrhaging land, are eternally up for grabs. There is no way most of them can be accurate. They are, at best, a set of approximate notations in a nightmare that is beyond measurement.

Here, nonetheless, is an attempt to tell a little of the Iraqi story by those numbers.

[Dhalgren]

1. K&R! from the Damned...

[EFerrari]

3. Are you suited up, Dhalgren?

[Dhalgren]

4. Locked and loaded, expat, locked and loaded...

[EFerrari]

5. You be safe. I may be not correct, but I want all of you home now.

:hug:

[EFerrari]

2. This short LTTE of mine was published in the Chron --

in response to a full page of color photographs of people, not numbers, in my local paper.
3/16/2004. :(


Editor -- Trying to confront the faces of those kids, the knowledge, they'll never buy a new car. Never do better at the birth of the second kid. Never refinance their home to send that one to college. We are not safer, here or there. We can do better than this.