[Rhodes22-list] Captain Rummy Said ...

[DCLewis1 at aol.com]

Ed,
 
You wrote: “You are letting the constant negative press color you analysis.  
If you
would look behind the bold headlines, there is progress.”
 
Let’s be very clear, the primary issue is not about press coloring, the  
issue is the body count each morning.  Body counts are not about “constant  
negative press color”, they’re hard numbers backed up by cold corpses in body  
bags.  
 
We are properly concerned about the American dead, almost 3,000 total  and 
that total continues to rise weekly.  But consider the case for Iraqi  citizens, 
 159 Iraqi’s are reported to have died last night.   There are estimates of 
several 100,000 Iraqi’s killed so far, and that’s only  the countable corpses, 
consider the many more mutilated and dismembered  survivors.  The corpses and 
mutilated and dismembered bodies are not “press  coloring”, they are 
quantifiable measures as to how well we’re doing.
 
When we moved in to Iraq we “fired” the police and civil government because  
they were politically incorrect.  We explicitly took on the responsibility  
to secure Iraq for ourselves and for the Iraqi’s - that’s our explicit job, we 
 volunteered, we forced ourselves on them.  We are failing.  The body  bags 
and the mutilated and dismembered survivors of that society show we are  
failing.  There’s our dead and the Iraqi dead that appear every day,  neither body 
count shows “progress”.  It’s not about “negative press  coloring”, it’s 
about countable cold corpses and our inability to stop new dead  bodies appearing 
every morning.
 
Dave