Ever deeper into hell

With the recent DC appearance of General David Petraeus, it is no surprise that puppeteers Bush and Cheney are keeping their Iraq show going. Their "surge" was supposed to be a short-term increase in troop numbers followed by a decrease. But it is now exceedingly clear that those numbers are not going to go down while The Decider is in power. And if "Hundred Years" McCain wins in November, God help us all.

As I type this, the total number of US troop deaths in Iraq is 4,033. The "official" number of US troops wounded is 29,628, but serious estimates run up to 100,000. The UPI reports that as many as one in ten soldiers from the "war on terror" (mostly Iraq) treated at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany had mental problems. That's about 1,000 troops. Retired general William Odom says this war/occupation is "brutalizing our troops."

It is impossible to know the precise number of Iraqi deaths, but the number is surely in the hundreds of thousands. (Justforeignpolicy.org estimates the number to be 1,197,469.)

The cost of this Iraq debacle in dollars is at this hour $510,915,919,333.

Bush and Cheney, you and your Neo-con cronies have created a veritable hell on Earth. We can only wonder how much deeper you can dig it in the next 276 days.