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I Bet You Didn't Know This Either, We Could Already Be In a World War
by James Glaser July 14, 2008 I knew the war George Bush started almost seven years ago in Afghanistan was being called, Operation Enduring Freedom, but I didn't know that some of our troops there have been fighting, and maybe dying in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, too. I say maybe dying, because Washington isn't forthcoming about where our troops die. I Googled, "Number of Americans Wounded in Afghanistan," and stumbled on a Defenselink Casualty Report. www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf There I found that 65 of the over 550 American troops killed so far in this war didn't die near Afghanistan. The Defense Department explains that they died in "other locations." They list these other locations as, Guantanamo (Cuba), Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Yemen. I remember something about seven or nine Special Forces troops getting killed in the Philippines right after we went into Afghanistan, but Americans fighting and dying in these other places never made any reports that I have read, but 65 of our troops have died in some of these "other" countries. I guess it is a bit like the fact that it is against the law for our media to photograph the coffins of our dead troops when they land on American soil. That's true—I'm not making that up. Well then, maybe it is against the law for our media to report when an American Soldier or Marine is killed if it isn't in Iraq or Afghanistan. Just maybe, if we were told about every country that we are having troops killed in, the American public might start thinking that George Bush has gotten us into a real World War. Keeping us in the dark makes George's War on Terror seem more manageable. In October we will be starting our eighth year of war in Afghanistan. Yesterday, nine American troops were killed when the Taliban (you remember the Taliban with their one-eyed leader Mulla Omar) attacked one of our outposts. That's right, the Taliban are taking the war to us, and those nine troops are the largest number of troops to be killed in any battle since the war started. No, Washington is not telling us how many other American troops were wounded. The number of wounded American troops in both Afghanistan and Iraq has been kept a secret since the war started. Washington will give out totals once or twice a month, but never on a daily basis like the number of American troops killed. It really is hard to figure exact numbers, but for sure over 35,000 Americans have been killed or wounded so far in Bush's War on Terror. We now know that this war has been fought in at least 17 countries. Also, we know that over a million innocent civilians have been killed or wounded, with millions being displaced. Then there are the tens of thousands of our war veterans, who are asking for help from the Veterans Administration for their PTSD, and thousands more who now suffer with traumatic brain injuries. With numbers like these, if George Bush's wars haven't reached the "World War" criteria yet, it has to be getting close. We do know that by the end of his eight years in office, George Bush will have had us in war for over seven of those years, with no end in sight. We do know that we went into Afghanistan to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and we also know that bin Laden left Afghanistan almost seven years ago. So, there are a lot of things about George Bush's war that we don't know, and that is the way Washington wants to keep it, especially if what we are in is a World War. |
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