Here are a couple of items about US senators being critical of the war. First, an article in which Fritz Hollings (Democrat, South Carolina) is quoted as not knowing what to tell a constituent whose son died in the fighting: Senator says situation in Iraq ‘is, chapter and verse, Vietnam’ again. And yet another great speech from Robert Byrd (Democrat, West Virginia), delivered as part of the Senate debate over the conference committee’s version of Bush’s $87 billion funding request: A high price for a hollow victory. From Byrd’s speech:

The President continues to insist that the United States will persevere in its mission in Iraq, that our resolve is unshakable. But it is time – past time – for the President to tell the American people exactly what that mission is, how he intends to accomplish it, and what his exit strategy is for American troops in Iraq. It is the American people who will ultimately decide how long we will stay in Iraq.

It is not enough for the President to maintain that the United States will not be driven out of Iraq by the increasing violence against American soldiers. He must also demonstrate leadership by presenting the American people with a plan to stem the freewheeling violence in Iraq, return the government of that country to the Iraqi people, and pave the way for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. We do not now have such a plan, and the supplemental conference report before us does not provide such a plan. The $87 billion in this appropriations bill provides the wherewithal for the United States to stay the course in Iraq when what we badly need is a course correction. The President owes the American people an exit strategy for Iraq, and it is time for him to deliver.

Here’s an opinion piece that ran last week in the San Diego Union Tribune. By James O. Goldsborough, it’s about the similarities between Bush and Lyndon Johnson, as each man finds himself hemmed in by past decisions, unable to alter course because doing so would amount to an embarrassing admission of error: World conflict and presidential vanity.

I keep thinking about that silly “Mission Accomplished” banner. Judith Bushmiller, the New York Times reporter who asked the question in last week’s press conference that led to Bush asserting that it was the sailors’ idea to fly the banner, has an interesting followup story: Two words on a banner that no author wants to claim. She paints an ever-so-slightly-clearer picture of who did what as the White House advance team and the PR officers on the Abraham Lincoln worked out the specifics of Bush’s flightsuit photo op.

I realize the story is completely trivial. But it’s like a loose tooth; I can’t stop fiddling with it.

I’m willing to accept that the idea for the banner was originally floated by someone from the ship, as a variation on the innocent practice of flying self-congratulatory banners at the end of a deployment. But for Bush to assert that it wasn’t latched onto by his visuals-obsessed image people as a symbolic backdrop that spoke of his success in winning the war in Iraq (excuse me, “successfully concluding major combat operations in the Iraq battle of the War on Terra”) is simply horseshit on the face of it.

I tried to talk ymatt into photoshopping the Reuters image from Bushmiller’s article to crop in on Bush’s head and the word “ACCOMPLISHED,” changing the word to read “ACCOMPLICE,” since I think that would be really funny. Alas, he remains unconvinced that that would be worth the effort involved. In the meantime, though, he was kind enough to create the following slightly different (and significantly easier) visual gag:

An excellent opinion piece from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jay Bookman finds a common thread running through several recent news stories: Bush team’s info-phobia hurts us, them.

David Rieff has a lengthy but really good article in the New York Times Magazine on the screwed-up planning for post-war Iraq: Blueprint for a mess. Rieff makes a compelling case that the failure we’re seeing now is at least in part the predictable result of poor planning by the Pentagon’s senior civilian leadership.

I’ve updated my earlier posting comparing the number of US deaths in Iraq and Vietnam at equivalent points in the history of the two wars. My previous charts used a projected figure for October that turned out to be overly optimistic; instead of 32 US military deaths in Iraq last month there actually ended up being 42.

Here are the charts again, updated with the actual number for October. (Again, I’m getting these figures from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.)

The first graph shows the first twelve months of the Vietnam war, and the first eight months of the Iraq war. (Click on any image for a larger version.)

Next, the same chart, with the Vietnam numbers extended out to cover the first four years of the war:

Finally, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:

There were some interesting comments on the original item. Some people would like to see the comparison expanded to include all casualties, not just deaths. The argument is that this would give a better comparison to Iraq, where the human cost is masked somewhat by the fact that we’ve gotten better at keeping wounded soldiers from dying. Another person was interested in seeing a comparison of deaths normalized for the number of US troops present in-theater at any given time. I think that would be pretty interesting; if you know where I can find statistics on the number of troops deployed in Iraq and Vietnam by month, please let me know.

Another person basically accused me of celebrating soldiers’ deaths because of my hatred of the Bush administration. There’s an element of truth in that accusation. I disagree strongly with this war; I think it is a mistake both in a broad moral sense and in a more narrow, practical sense. I see it as a crime against humanity, justified by lies and pursued by people who lack the moral clarity to recognize the wrong they are committing. Besides being wrong in those terms, though, I believe this war is just plain stupid in a practical sense, in that it will hurt, rather than help, the longterm security interests of Americans (along with pretty much everyone else on the planet), while exacting a terrible price in terms of money and lives.

It’s true that I want to see Bush punished politically for his decision to launch this war, and evidence of the ongoing death toll is an important part of making that case. But it isn’t just personal animosity toward Bush that’s motivating me. I’m not just looking for retribution. I’m looking for deterrence. It’s wrong for politicians to lie their way into wars like this, and then lie about the consequences of their having done so. I’m pissed at Bush about that, but more importantly, I want to stop him, and stop other politicians who would do the same thing in the future. I want to demonstrate to them that, as a practical matter, lying your way into an ill-conceived war is a losing proposition, politics-wise.

Yes, the Iraq war is not yet giving us the kind of horrific death toll we saw at the peak of the Vietnam war. But that isn’t the point. The point is that if a war is wrong, then even one death is a horrible injustice. Forty deaths a month is much worse.

The main tragedy of the Vietnam war, in my mind at least, wasn’t the number of people who died. It was the number of people who died needlessly. It was the fact that having pledged their lives to protect their country from harm, soliders had those lives wasted in pursuit of a very different, and much less noble, goal: protecting politicians from the embarrassment of admitting that their policies had failed.

I believe that’s exactly what’s happening now. And I want it to end sooner, rather than later.

Some interesting commentary continues to appear about Bush’s attempt to deny responsibility for the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the Abraham Lincoln. From David Sarasohn, writing in the Oregonian: Six months later, carefully editing a two-word banner. Sarasohn points out how the ease of searching old news items on the net makes it trivial to expose a lie like this.

And from Dave Lindorff, writing in CounterPunch: Big lies and little lies. Lindorff makes the interesting observation that, paradoxically, it is the smallness of this lie, the pettiness of it, that makes it so significant. He writes:

As the guerrilla war heats up in Iraq, and the numbers of American dead mount, he “mission accomplished” line, like the “Bring ’em on” line, is returning to haunt him. But this time, instead of just showing him to be out of touch, we see the real character of the man. Caught in an embarrassing situation, he’d prefer to lie his way out than face up to his responsibility.

So, who is it who still thinks Bush has the judgement, maturity, and emotional stability required to lead the most powerful nation on earth? And for those of you who do, how do you account for this “Mission Accomplished” lie? Again, I’m not arguing that the lie itself was some kind of earth-shaking crime. It was trivial. But what it shows about Bush’s character is, I think, pretty significant.