Four years after the war began, its architects and its supporters are beginning to sound like the optimist who jumped off a building. Every floor he fell, he said, “So far, so good.”
Four years after the war began, and three years after the violent insurgency began to push back any American gains in the country, members of the Bush administration still seems to think they have a few more floors to fall before they have to worry.
It’s understandable, their reluctance to define an end to the war.
It’s not their skin in the game. They won’t lose sleep over children in harm’s way or jump at every loud noise or learn to walk on crutches. They won’t hold flags beside the coffins of loved ones.
They won’t, as William Davis’ family has had to, figure out how to go on in the face of the cost of this war.
Davis was a 26-year-old soldier from Grand Rapids, Mich., whose father served in Vietnam and whose grandfather fought in World War II. He had been scheduled to come home to Michigan in less than a month for the birth of his son, his family told the Grand Rapids Press.
When he left the military, he wanted to be a policeman.
He was killed last week by a roadside bomb, according to The Associated Press, one of 53 military deaths in Iraq this month. So far.
A.
There is no other fear quite as intense as that felt by a politician who has to face the voters. That fear drives them to extremes of centrism. Better to have another 3000 soldiers die in Iraq than risk losing an election.