The Hopeless "War on Terror"

As of January 1, 2007 the death toll in Iraq reached a total of 3,003 US soldiers in addition to 46,880 young Americans wounded, maimed and scarred for life casualties. See http://icasualties.org/ and http://antiwar.com/casualties/ current statistics.

As expected, US official estimates of Iraqi civilian casualties are kept considerably low but a scientific study by the British medical journal, The Lancet, reports an estimated war related death count of 655,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children. This figure far exceeds that of Saddam's murderous regime.

It is painfully clear that the United States government miscalculated not only Saddam’s Hussein “weapons of mass destruction”, but also their ability to control, stabilize and restore Iraq. With blind arrogance our government ignored and downplayed the complexity of Iraq’s religious and political makeup and underestimated the determination of the Muslim world.

This grave error in judgment resulted in a 400% increase in terrorist attacks worldwide since 2004. See GlobalTerrorism Data Base at http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/ current statistics. The cost of war exceeds 355 billion and could top 2 trillion within three years as estimated by Columbia University economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. See http://www.costofwar.com/ for current figure. Meanwhile, our national debt is at an all time high; $8.6 trillion as of January 1, 2007. The share of each and every US citizen in this debt is $28,601.29 and rising. See http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ for current statistics.

These figures are definitive proof that our government's strategy on the so called war on terror is not working. Couldn't this country put this staggering amount of money and resources to better use? The unconscionable amount of our taxpayers' dollars invested fighting terror in Iraq could finance the best national security at home money can buy, including building the best education and health care systems any country has ever seen.

It is time for our government to face the facts and acknowledge the ineffectiveness and futility of their so called “war on terror”, and that we, the citizens of these United States, join together and demand the expeditious withdrawal of our troops from Iraq.