Seventeen

As I sat in my living room this morning in the pre-dawn darkness trying to raise the amount of nicotine in my body to self-prescribed levels, I heard a number meander out of my television. Seventeen. "Seventeen?" I thought, my God, we have already lost seventeen members of our Armed Forces this month. After all, it's only the fourth of the month.

A flip to the New York Times confirmed what most of us knew all along. The surge, is only accomplishing to pad the butcher's bill that Bush's fiasco has become. From the New York Times:

Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

One third of one city, that is all the surge has managed to pacify. And for these gains, we are now averaging the loss of over four servicemen a day.

As I told people at the time of this invasion, once we went in, we went through the looking glass. There would and could be no second chances because once we lost control in such a heavily armed country, it was over. The Bush administration has done nothing but attempt second chance after second chance each a Friedman long, forever to be followed by another.

It's over, the guys in charge of this war fucked it up, and we can never fix it. End it.