by James Glaser
September 2, 2004

I know it is hard to tell, but America has troops in the field and we are at war. The media has taken the war off the front page and has buried it someplace out of sight.

According to the LA Times, "Two months after the US handed sovereignty back to Iraq amid hopes of reduced violence, more than 110 US troops have been killed and much of the country remains hostile territory."

George Bush and the Republicans would like us to forget Iraq and have us think that everything is going "swell" over there. The truth is that on average, almost two American Soldiers or Marines are killed each and every day and many times that number are getting wounded.

But really who cares about the Troops? Not President Bush, nor John Kerry, because they have campaigns to run. There are still thousands of our young men and women running around Iraq without the protection of armor for themselves and the vehicles they drive. America supports the troops only in slogans.

Both political parties could spend just a fraction of their campaign money and all of our troops would have the body armor they need, but that isn't going to happen because both Bush and Kerry need that money to throw dirt on each other in television advertisements.

As of Monday, 974 US troops have died in Iraq, 836 of them since the Commander in Chief declared an end to major combat May 1st of last year US forces are attacked about 60 times every day and now we report over 6,500 of our troops wounded.

Any where from 10,000 to 15,000 innocent Iraqis have been killed so far and the number of innocent Iraqis wounded, numbers in the tens of thousands.

America is at war and we are in a political campaign. The campaign wins out over news about brave young Americans giving their lives for their country.

Post Script.

Senator John McCain spoke at the Republican Convention and in his speech he criticized Michael Moore, the film maker, about his movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. He said Moore was a "Disingenuous filmmaker." It was so sad to find out later that John McCain had to tell Chris Mathews on MSNBC, that he really never saw the movie and had no idea of what the movie contained. McCain lied to the Nation on national television.