So this is Christmas, John Lennon sang to us three and a half decades ago.
But war is not over, even though we want it to be.
This Iraq War the American people never wanted in the first place, and a big majority doesn’t want now.
And yet Bush keeps waging it, and Congress keeps funding it.
And the bodies keep stacking up, inexorably to the 4,000 mark—and that’s just U.S. soldiers.
The stack of Iraqi civilians may be more than 50 or 100 times that.
And the cost in our tax dollars, though on a lower moral scale, is still astronomical, weighing in at $500 billion so far, and climbing at $3 billion a week.
We could have been enjoying universal health care right now and for every day of Bush’s war with this level of expenditure.
But what do we have instead?
A quagmire in Iraq.
Our ally, Turkey, bombing the Kurds in northern Iraq under U.S. protection and with U.S. intelligence.
Merry Christmas, Kurds.
And for the families of U.S. soldiers stuck over there in Iraq, some for the second, and third, and even fourth tour, it can’t be a Merry Christmas, either.
John Lennon sang, “Let’s stop all the fight.”
There’s a Christmas wish we’ve got to fulfill by this time next year.