Standing By Your Sex-Hobbyist -Man; Because It's Your Fault Too?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY IRAQ WAR

Four years ago I was sitting in a hospital in Utica, New York talking with doctors and nurses about my father, of blessed memory. He'd flipped his SUV on black ice while running an errand from the assisted living facility where he'd moved just months before. Dad was doing well. Making new friends and being the gregarious, compassionate and wonderful man I knew he was. He was still depressed over the death of our mother just a few years prior; she was his whole world. But he was starting to move on with his life. He was a doting grandfather and the kind of friend you meet once in a lifetime.

Dad didn't tell anyone what had really happened to the car. My brother found out later when he went to the shop where it had been towed. Dad walked away from the accident with what he thought was a 'bump on the head.' It was profound brain injury. A couple days later he didn't show up for dinner at the facility and was found on the floor of his apartment, unconcious. He was rushed to surgery and he never woke up.

So there I sat with my brother, making the decision to pull his life support. Dad would not have wanted to live that way. He was much too alive as a person. My brother and I both promised each other that if anything like that happened to the other, we'd be sure to do the same for each other. A couple days later, support was pulled after my brother and I said our goodbyes to him and he passed just moments later. I know he heard me. Once I year I go to the chapel where his ashes are and tell him everything that happened that year, and how profoundly I miss him.

The day Dad went Home and for the past 4 years, it often feels like all the oxygen is gone around me. His yartzheit is Monday.

At the hotel where my children & I were staying, the television were glued to Iraq. Shock & awe was happening a world away. The oxygen being pulled out of the 9/11 tragedy and transferred to an unrelated situation that only PNAC wanted. Here's how that delusion started:

My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.

On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. More than 35 countries are giving crucial support -- from the use of naval and air bases, to help with intelligence and logistics, to the deployment of combat units. Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honor of serving in our common defense.
...

We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people.

...
Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.

From Taylor Marsh:
Four years ago tomorrow, George W Bush, the president of the United States of America launched the world into an unnecessary war that has cost 3218 American dead, over 23,000 American injured, anywhere from 59,000 to 650,000 Iraqi dead, over $379 billion in direct costs to the American taxpayer, a civil war that has destroyed the Iraqi nation, a conflict that has destabilized the region, a quagmire that has energized religious extremists, and a blunder that has damaged American diplomacy and diminished American credibility for decades to come.

PLEASE READ TAYLOR MARSH'S GREAT ARTICLE ON THE IRAQ ANNIVERSARY

After four years, the White House still says it has no clue how what they started will play out. ARTICLE

Many of us lost friends at 9/11. Many mothers have lost their children in Iraq. Losing the oxygen out of their world too. 9/11 and Iraq have ZERO to do with each other no matter how much 'spin-glue' the Bush Administration try to put on it. Osama is still out there, pushing his dialysis machine around some cave.

Is this right?