Trust kills.

The casualty numbers are in for October, and man god damn things are going swimmingly over in Iraq. Only 34 U.S. dead – that’s just a little more than one a day (a bitter pill for someone to swallow, but no one who counts, apparently). I don’t recall what the Iraqi corpse figure was – it had four digits, for sure – but (and this is important!) the first digit was smaller than last month’s. Progress! Or so we’re told by the administration, the “commanders in the field”, the mainstream press, and supporters of the “surge” in general. This is, after all, best framed (from their point of view) as some kind of ball game wherein the winning team is the one with the highest (or lowest) score. It makes the war easier to sell, report on, and defend. But war differs from sports in one very important respect – in sports the object is simply to win, so numbers count; on the other hand, there is typically a strategic or tactical purpose to any war, and this one is no exception. While we should be thinking about why we’re in Iraq, the “surge” cheering section wants us to think about how well we’re doing. There’s light at the end of the tunnel! they tell us… but what’s the destination?

All of you who have been opposed to this stupid war from the very beginning, as well as those who’ve turned against it along the way, be prepared to hear some crowing. You can hear it already, I’m sure – the armchair admiral next door, perhaps, who probably believes that if we had listened to those “cut-and-runners”, Al Qaeda would be in charge of Iraq right now. They still think (as they are encouraged to) Al Qaeda is like Wal-Mart: a huge, vertically integrated global enterprise in which every suicide bombing is instantaneously tabulated by a sophisticated inventory system somewhere in Waziristan. Of course, that’s what our political culture wants us to think, and it’s rubbish. Whereas there is a lot more terrorist activity globally now since the invasion of Iraq (no accident), outfits like Al Qaeda in Iraq are made up principally of Iraqis, many of whom now comprise the “Anbar Awakening” council. These cut-throats have ethnically cleansed large areas of central Iraq, and are now in the process of cutting deals with us for oil concessions and reconstruction funds – hence the tactical cease fire. So much for quelling the violence of others – we’re merely underwriting it.

Hearing our military commanders and political leaders (the “experts”) talk, you’d think we’d invaded Iraq just to keep Sunnis and Shi’as from killing one another – part of our broader strategy of spreading sunshine wherever we go, right? Two points relating to that. First, with probably close to a million dead and at least 4.5 million driven from their homes (2.5 million in Jordan and Syria), the human catastrophe has already largely taken place, the direct result of our invasion. Second, we invaded to establish that “enduring relationship” Bush now speaks of; a long-term military presence in the heart of the middle east’s richest oil producing region. In this respect, the mission has succeeded, because now both major U.S. political parties support the idea of staying in Iraq for years to come. If the administration, the major parties, or our military leaders gave a damn about the Iraqi people, they would make some minimal effort to a) determine how many have been killed, injured, or displaced by our invasion, and b) pay reparations for the terrible toll we have taken on their lives and their nation. This won’t happen (unless we insist upon it), and our so-called experts – Republican and Democrat – will do and say anything it takes to keep our military in the heart of Iraq. That’s the point of this game.