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Mr. President, today is a very somber day. The U.S.military death toll reached 2,000 in Iraq, a figure that I -- and every American -- hoped we would never reach. Our hearts go out to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones.

I pray for these young Americans, may they rest in peace; and I pray for their families, may they heal.

Let us honor their lives and their memory.

And let us honor the lives of those who continue to serve by developing a credible plan for Iraq. It is time for this Administration to level with the American people and provide a strategy for success.

As the current investigation into the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame reminds us, this Administration took us to war on false intelligence, misstatements, and exaggerations.

This Administration told the American people that we had no other option but to go to war because the regime of Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the security of the United States.

However, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, and there was no serious link between Iraq and al Qaeda.

The Administration also provided rosy scenarios and false expectations about how the United States would be greeted as liberators in Iraq and how the war would be brief. In fact, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld actually said in February 2003 that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

Yet here we are, two and a half years later, lamenting the death of the 2,000th soldier in Iraq. Of those 2,000 soldiers, 464 of these soldiers were either from California or based in California.

Even as attacks on American soldiers continue, the Administration refuses to level with the American people. In May 2005, Vice President Cheney proclaimed that: "I think the level of activity that we see today in Iraq from a military standpoint, I think will clearly decline. I think they’re in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Since that day -- since Vice President Cheney told us that violence was coming to an end in Iraq -- more than 300 Americans have lost their lives. And the violence continues to escalate.

Today we do not just lament the strategic disaster in Iraq, the loss of U.S. credibility around the world, and the overwhelming costs to the American taxpayer. Above all, we mourn the tragic deaths of 2,000 young Americans.

These men and women voluntarily put their lives on the line to defend us when they put on the uniform of the United States Armed Forces. They put their trust in the government that we would only send them to war if there was no other recourse.

In rushing to war, in twisting and revising the case for war, and in failing to plan for the aftermath of the war, this Administration broke the trust with these young men and women at a catastrophic cost.

These 2,000 young men and women have sons and daughters, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, friends and extended family, all of whose lives have been forever changed by the consequences of this reckless war.

Today, let us remember these 2,000 brave Americans. Let us honor their lives and their memory by bringing this war to an end.

Submitter: Rob Kall

Submitters Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation