Fighting Terror

From the Baton Rouge Advocate today:

Jared Crouch, 21, a cavalry scout with a Stryker brigade out of Fort Lewis, Wash., had only been stationed in Iraq for a little more than a month, his mother, Kathy Rushing [Jared's mother], said.

....

Kathy Rushing said her younger son, John Crouch, a reservist with a maintenance company stationed in Iraq, would try to join his brother’s body on the flight back to the U.S.

Jared, who is from Zachary, Louisiana, was one of 14 American troops killed this past weekend. I pray for Jared and extend my prayers and sympathy to his family and friends.

In addition to the cost in lives, approaching the 4000 mark, and wounded, numbering 34,000, some with terrible wounds, loss of limbs, blindness, head injuries, serious mental health problems, we are spending 2 billion dollars per week on the war. Numbers of dead and wounded from Iraq Casualty Count.

I picked up this bit of information at ICC, also: Died of Self-Inflicted wounds - 111.

That's to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, and numbers of Iraqi wounded beyond counting. For numbers of Iraqi dead, take the number 655,000 from an article in the Washington Post, or these numbers: minimum - 64776, maximum - 70934, of civilian casualties from Iraqi Body Count. The Washington Post piece says:

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

On the very same front page in the Advocate is an Associated Press wire story with the headline: "Informants gaining importance in foiling terrorists plots in U.S."

This story concerns the foiled plot to bomb JFK airport and "a jet fuel pipeline that runs through populous residential neighborhoods to the airport."

New York - A convicted drug dealer who agreed to pose as a wannabe terrorist among a group now accused of plotting to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport secretly fed information to federal investigators in exchange for a lighter sentence.

....

Four Muslim men are accused of plotting to use explosives to destroy a jet fuel pipeline that runs through populous residential neighborhoods to the airport. It is believed they intended to kill thousands of people and trigger an economic catastrophe.

The link leads to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, because the Advocate does not have an online link to the AP story.

I assume the headline was written in Baton Rouge, and it led me to the conclusion that it was just plain wrong. Intelligence gathering has always been important in foiling terrorist plots, but whether the Bush maladministration is aware of that, I don't know, nor do I know if the FBI and the CIA receive the proper amount of funding to get good intelligence on impending plots.

However, I do believe that we could improve our intelligence capabilities on much less than 2 billion dollars a week. But, no. We're spending that amount of money fighting in Iraq, at great cost in lives, and loss of limbs and quality of life for those who survive. We make these sacrifices to fight in a country that never attacked us, never intended to attack us, and is now a breeding ground for terrorists and an inspiration to would-be terrorists around the world, who are angry about what we are doing in Iraq and, as a result, want to do us harm.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother with this kind of post, because it takes considerable time to do the links and the quotes, and I know I'm preaching to the choir, but seeing these two stories together, one below the other, I felt compelled to say something.

Perhaps, I'd have done better and saved time by simply quoting these words:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"