Looking afar

With relatively little being said about Iraq lately in the presidential campaign, i suspect the average American is not thinking much about how Bush's deadly boondoggle continues to simmer.

The Iraqi government's Shia majority is shying away from a supposedly imminent pact, months in the making, that would allow US troops to stay in Iraqi cities until next year and in the country itself until 2011. Iraqi Shia leader Moqtada al-Sadr (presently giving orders from a site in Iran) is calling for immediate withdrawal. Yesterday some 50,000 of his followers marched loudly through the streets of Baghdad.

At the same time, the strength of al-Qaeda is growing in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city of almost two million people. There Sunni insurgents have this month driven hundreds of Christian families--over 8,300 people--out of the city. Last week they murdered 12 Christians there. (About a third of Iraq's estimated 800,000 Christians have fled Iraq since the Bush invasion in 2003.)

There are still about 144,000 US troops in Iraq. As of last Thursday, 4,185 US troops had been killed. It is estimated that over 100,000 have been wounded. The group Just Foreign Policy estimates the war has caused some 1,273,000 Iraqi deaths.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan (which is only 750 miles from Iraq), 613 US troops and 380 coalition troops have already been killed. (Note that less coalition troops have been killed in Iraq--314 of them.) David Richards, the British general who commands 32,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, says that, lacking increased reconstruction work, 70 percent of Afghans could end up backing the Taliban. A huge reason the Taliban are on the rise is that they are now being financed by $3 billion a year in drug profits.

As frightening as the present economic crisis is for all Americans, we had better not stop looking at those faraway places. After eight years of blind recklessness in the White House, we the people cannot wait any longer to demand wisdom.