Turning Point

US dead in Iraq reached 2,800 today. That's 2,660 since "Mission Accomplished" at the "end" of major combat operations. This month is the highest casualty rate (3.9 dead Americans per day) since January 2005 (4.1) which itself was the highest since November 2004 (4.7). BushCheney claims that the this month's high casualty rate can be attributed to the Battle of Baghdad in which US forces are taking the fight to the enemy.

I don't doubt that US forces are heavily engaged. What I doubt is the result. The administration, at least before it started making noises about adjusting strategies, implied that the battle would be a turning point but I don't buy it any more than the January 2005 elections were a turning point or the Battle of Falluja in November 2004 were a turning point.

If these events were turning points, they were turning points in an endless spiral of death, going round and round in a deadly circle with no end in sight. Thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Not to mention the many, many wounded, displaced and dispossessed.

How many more? How long will Americans allow their country continue this abomination?

American history offers one solution:

...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.