"They died in vain."

Our local daily newspaper, The Rochester Democrat & Chronicle -refuses to print the casualty statistics from the Bush Administration's Iraq fiasco. However, City our "alternative newsweekly" does, and in this week's issue (1-7 November) reports that "2811 US soldiers, 239 Coalition soldiers, and approximately 44,803 to 49,760 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq from the beginning of the war and occupation to October 26."

Writing in The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash offers a blunt and bleak assessment of these deaths.. He argues the British and American governments have sent young men and women off to kill and die in Iraq for nothing. You can read his essay here. But here are a few of the highlights:

"To exchange tyranny for anarchy is merely to move from one circle of hell to another. ... The country is already in civil war. As foreign troops leave, that is almost certain to get worse before it perhaps - but only perhaps - gets better ..."

"An intervention that was intended to make the world safer for democracy has made the world more dangerous for all democracies." (TGA is charitable, I think, about the actual intentions of the US and British governments.)

"It's not too soon to suggest that the invasion of Iraq has proved to be the greatest strategic blunder of our time."

"Oh yes, and there's the cost. The Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has estimated that the total eventual costs of the war, "including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion" - that's $2,000,000,000,000. That would be $2,000 a head for each of the world's poorest billion people, who live (and die) on less than $1 a day."

And, unsurprisingly, The Guardian also reports that the very neoconservative ideologues who promoted the war in the first place now are engaged in mutual recriminations as they seek to pass the blame off onto someone, anyone, other than themselves. This is a shameful display.