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Ready, Willing, ...?

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Message Richard Hirschhorn
If I were a Charley Rose, I would ask these young planners a simple question: “My darlings, are we sleeping well these days?’

We are all kept well informed of the U.S. body count in Iraq.  Each milestone is duly noted.  The gusher of financial waste is toted.  Less well reported are “enemy” losses, and incidental American casualties among contractors and journalists.  There is, however, an effort to calculate civilian casualties.  These are non-combatant deaths.  These are innocent people.  They are the men, women, teenagers and little children who have been violently killed.  A British organization, Iraq Body Count, puts the “toll” at around 100,000.  This is the conservative figure.  Some estimates exceed one million innocents dead.

“My darlings, are we sleeping well these days?”

What are the costs for not learning “about this part of the world” before, rather than after embarking on an adventure that would surely result in the ultimate sacrifice by so many?  Which institution of higher learning can tell us how many more died when we “didn’t anticipate?" What percentage of the carnage could have been avoided if we weren’t “out of synch?”  How many tens of thousands may have been spared if it had not been for the “bad implementation” and the “misjudgments?”

In defending the President, her boss, Ms. O’Sullivan assured Charley Rose that Mr. Bush had not acted recklessly.  Before each commitment he would responsibly consult with the “experts."  It was only then, after receiving this blessing from the thinkers, an assurance of probable success, that he acted.  On what basis were those assurances issued?

We know the pain we feel when we make mistakes.  A tragic mistake can be crushing.  We can all imagine how someone might feel if they accidentally ran over and killed a little girl on a bicycle.  Is it the case that one child run over is a tragedy, but twenty thousands are just a statistic?

Things have not gone as we planned in Mesopotamia.  No sane person would have acted if we had known how many would die.  It was an accident.  Where we once might have had a picture of a shaken and trembling Megan, pale and ashen under a black veil, without makeup and oblivious to her appearance, kneeling in a cold knave of a great cathedral, seeking God’s forgiveness and salvation, we now have a celebrity.

While she “reflects,” she has been embraced by Harvard University.  She is a senior fellow, and lecturer.  Her career has been advanced.  We may assume the boys at Brookings are also doing well.

After many years of advising presidents, she retired from government service in 2007.

She was thirty-eight years old.

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