and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Okay, I don't chime in on this war bidness to often but I feel compelled. From a few days ago:

President George W. Bush, speaking amid protests and growing public unease over Iraq, said on Monday America owed it to the more than 1,800 U.S. soldiers killed there to complete the mission, which he linked with the campaign against terrorism.

Can I stop for two seconds and call bullshit on both sides here? The right told us that we must stand up against terrorism. In fact they've been telling us for a long time. Even Reagan blathered about how he would not negotiate with those crazy people over in the desert. So what is the left doing? Bowing to terrorism - internal terrorism of the informational kind. On the one hand you have leftists arguing that the troops should come home because of the gross number of deaths among our soldiers. On the other hand you have the right, even W. hisself, telling us that, because so many soldiers have died, we owe them - we have a duty to make something good of this, come home with a victory, else their souls were slaught in vain.. which is just another way for Bush to try and appeal to the support our troops movement, a movement designed to be so morally just that it's almost impossible to disagree with the war and not be labelled an infidel of the spirit of America. It's got everyone dancing the two-step if you even suggest that you might not agree with the way this administration is handling things.

But the bottom line is this: 1800 deaths is a drop in the bucker. This iraq situation is arguably more important than some recent historical conflicts such as Korea and yet the current casualties are a fraction of what we saw then.

Korean War, U.S. troops: 23,615 KIA, 2,460 died of wounds, 2,849 captured and declared dead, 2,825 other deaths, and 4,825 MIA (Missing In Action)

That's 36,574.. and if you didn't know, the Korean War lasted about three years.

Vietnam, U.S. troops: 58,226 were killed in action or classified as missing in action. That lasted roughly seven years.

Gulf War I: the Dept. of Defense reports 147 battle-related and 325 non-battle-related deaths. If you do the math, considering that conflict lasted roughly 40 days, that rate of death toll spread over 2 years would add up to over 8,000 deaths.

And I don't have to remind you there were well over 1800 deaths in the single-day 9/11 disaster.

I'm not a proponent of this particular war. I appreciate the efforts of the poverty-level men and women who are forced into the military by an invisible draft. I don't appreciate the invisible draft. I don't appreciate how badly the men and women of the U.S. Armed forces are lied to by not only their own government but by their employer. You would be hard pressed to find a private corporation in this country that could get away with the sort of false promises the army hands out on a daily basis. You think being an unionized Wal*Mart employee is bad, try being a private in the usmc.

But I'm also not a bleeding heart blubbering idiot who reacts to emotional attacks. If the President showed video of kittens being killed in Iraq, I would not be for this war. If they showed one person being killed, I would not be for the war. People need to stop being reactionary, think logically, and that means the rights and the lefts. The death of 1800 people is not a valid reason to justify a war, nor is it a valid reason to justify ending a war. It goes a little deeper than that.

And I don't have to remind you that over twice that number of 1800 die from colorectal cancer in the U.S. alone per month but I don't see nearly the amount of political furvor for cancer research that I did for that crazy Saddam guy in his tighty whities.