War Death Toll Passes 2000

By James Donahue

July 28, 2005

If you have been watching the counter at the upper right corner of this site you know that the official number of American soldiers killed in action in our two “wars on terror” in Afghanistan and Iraq tallied up past the 2,000 mark today.

As of noon today, the count was at 2002, with 1,788 lost in Iraq and another 214 killed in Afghanistan. I don’t know of any media organization that is counting the casualties from the two war fronts together. I have to glean this information from various places at least three times daily just to keep the numbers up to date.

This is a tragic figure. I remember the heartaches associated with the death notices to families during the Vietnam conflict, when I was a working reporter that followed the soldiers  to the family doorstep to get a photo and biographical sketch.

The effect of a young man or woman’s tragic death in war on his or her family is beyond description. I sensed their agony, even though I never personally experienced such a loss.

The tragedy is that none of these young people had to die in battle. There never was a need to fight on foreign soil to keep the homeland safe from terrorists. That we have done so is only promising to bring terrorism home to our cities for sure. The attack on our country on 911 was a result of our misdeeds behind the scene throughout the Middle East.

Our interest in that area of the world has always been oil. It remains oil even to this day. We battle for control of two countries where puppet governments will help give us control of the rich oil reserves in the ground there. That we are thinking of pointing our guns at Syria and Iran should surprise no one.

This is what our children are over there fighting, dying and getting maimed for. We are fighting for dwindling reserves of the oil America needs to keep its industry operating without skipping a beat.

This must change.

We cannot continue to see business as usual in the United States. The capitalistic system we live buy demands that everything runs faster and grows larger so profits are always on the rise. Anything less is failure.

We do this at the expense of the rest of the world.

We do this at the expense of the Mother Earth and the future of our children.

We do this at the risk of human extinction and the loss of our soul.

This is why it all most come to a crashing halt. Our children should not be dying for such a heinous cause. If the old ones in Washington think we need to have a war like this, let them go over there to fight it.