President Bush's April 13 address to the nation does little to end the bloodbath in Iraq right now.
As the war escalated over the past few weeks, many of my African-American friends and colleagues pointed to the latest wave of U.S. casualties as further evidence that the war should not have been fought in the first place.
Only midway through the month, April has already exceeded the total number wounded for any other full month of the war by more than 220, according to the Associated Press.
Dozens of American soldiers have been killed, hundreds of Iraqi civilians are reported dead, militia groups have taken numerous hostages and the Iraqi population is losing its tolerance for the U.S. presence in its country.
But for most African-Americans, opposition to the war did not begin just recently when the violence spiraled out of control.
According to several polls taken right before the war, only a minority of African-Americans supported the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. Most notably, a poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies had found that only 19 percent of African-Americans supported it.
That is a striking statistic, especially considering that more than 70 percent of white Americans were in favor of the military invasion, according to some polls.
But now more Americans are sharing our doubts.
First, we know that Iraq probably does not have weapons of mass destruction and did not have them when the United States launched its invasion. David Kay, the chief weapons inspector for the United States in Iraq, recently testified to this fact before the U.S. Senate. "It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing," Kay said.
Hans Blix, the U.N. chief weapons inspector in Iraq, is also on record saying that Iraq does not, and did not, have weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded the country.
Second, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has revealed that the Bush administration was thinking about going into Iraq long before the war and well before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.
What's more, Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who worked in the Clinton and Bush administrations, also testified the Bush administration was interested in Iraq well before the March 2003 invasion.
Clarke also asserts that the Iraq War is fueling terrorism, not defeating it. The war, he writes in "Against All Enemies," does "make terrorist recruitment easier."
The war should be brought to an end today. We cannot afford the daily casualties. We cannot afford to recruit more terrorists against us.
Brian Gilmore is a lawyer and poet with two collections of poetry, including "Jungle Nights and Soda Fountain Rags: A Poem for Duke Ellington and the Duke Ellington Orchestra" (Karibu Books, 2000). He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.