War Pigs--A Rock and Roll Epistle
By Richard Girard
"Generals gathered in their masses,
Just like witches at black masses;
Evil minds that plot destruction,
Sorcerers of death's construction.
In the fields the bodies burning,
As the war machine keeps turning;
Death and hatred to mankind,
Poisoning their brainwashed minds... Oh Lord yeah!"
"War Pigs," Black Sabbath
Paranoid, 1971
Officially Combat Operations in Iraq are now over. De jure, as an attorney would say.
De facto, we still have 50,000 troops in harm's way there, officially six "advisory brigades." In the Second World War, 50,000 men was the minimum size for an Army Corps: three 15,000 man divisions plus support troops. We also have God only knows how many mercenaries--I mean "contractors"--in Iraq.
I wish we had real journalists practicing real journalism.
Over four thousand American dead, 31,000 wounded. As many as one million Iraqi dead, many hundreds of thousands injured, millions displaced or driven into refugee camps. Our strategic and diplomatic position in the Middle East is compromised, and we no longer have a local counterpoise to Iran. Nearly a trillion dollars has been wasted in Iraq itself (according to the CBO), to no good advantage for the American people as a whole. Billions more will need to be spent to return our military--especially National Guard and Reserve units--to the state of readiness they enjoyed in January 2001.
And Osama bin Ladin (probably) still lives.
To paraphrase Charles Fox after the Battle of Guilford Court House during our Revolutionary War, "You call this a success: another such victory and I fear for the survival of our nation."
