Labor Day weekend marked the end of Wack the Iraq, a boardwalk game in the seaside town of Wildwood, New Jersey. (Its inventors must have assumed that customers untroubled by the game’s objective would also be unlikely to bristle at the gross grammatical insult of its name.) The game involved players shooting paintballs at live human targets posing as Iraqis—that is, people in ridiculous dark plastic suits, trudging half-heartedly around a pen while getting splattered with paint. My family watched this spectacle with our own eyes this summer and found ourselves recoiling as a five-year-old girl took aim at a pretend Saddam. We weren’t the only ones disturbed; an outcry from antidiscrimination activists led to the game’s early closing (the rest of the boardwalk arcade remains open until mid-October).
It’s hard to believe that it’s been a year and a half since combat began. I remember vividly the evening of those first Baghdad bombings. I was feeling sad and frantic about the news, and I walked into the living room to be near my kids—who, it turned out, were setting up a friendly game of Risk. I stopped cold. They stared back with a collective “What?”
“Please,” I said, “put that away.”
“Oh, right,” they said in a flurry, as if they’d momentarily forgotten all about the impending bloodshed on the other side of the globe. They argued mildly among themselves until they settled on Pictionary as a more suitable game to play.
Now, more than one thousand American soldiers have died in the “campaign.” All but one hundred and forty of the U.S. deaths have come since May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations under a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
One thousand American deaths are terrible indeed, but I can’t fully process an isolated American statistic when it is estimated unofficially that between ten thousand and thirty thousand Iraqis have been killed since the United States invaded their country. There are no official figures for the number of Iraqi civilians killed, but Iraq Body Count, a group organized by British and U.S. researchers, believes the number exceeds 11,000.
An organization called Project on Defense Alternatives maintains a website with more detailed accounts of the losses, including press excerpts, such as this April 2003 account by Peter Beaumont in the London-based Observer: “Hanaan no longer has much of a face to speak of. This slim 17-year-old girl has burns that cover her whole body….Ali, his parents say, had been a curious boy and was playing with unexploded ordnance when he was injured….Surgeons give him a 50 per cent chance of survival—not because of his injuries…but because of the risk of infection in a ward terribly short of antibiotics….One of the US Marine guards outside the Medical City Complex…recalls a boy brought in with all of his face except his lower jaw shot away. The child had been traveling in a car with his parents that had approached a US checkpoint too fast for the soldiers’ taste. So they drilled it with heavy machine-gun fire. Radaad Latif Jassan al Obeidi stands by the bed of his son Saadeq, 22. He says he was injured in his stomach by the same bomb that landed near their home….Saadeq’s leg has been amputated at the thigh.”
War is hell. But this war is worse, because its justification was based on falsehoods. As the election approaches, I want John Kerry to take a stronger stand. With Minnesota as a toss-up state, there is no way can I risk helping Bush by voting for Ralph Nader. Why won’t Kerry heed the advice doled out recently by feisty columnist Helen Thomas, who said that the Democratic candidate could stand to “learn something from two previous wartime Republican presidential candidates who had a better take on the public pulse and won the White House.”
Thomas recalled that in 1952, during the Korean War, Dwight D. Eisenhower promised that he would “go to Korea” and end the bloodshed. Once in office, he kept his promise and went to Korea. The war ended with a ceasefire standoff months after his inauguration. Then in 1968, Richard Nixon assured voters that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. Forced in part by Congress, Nixon did reduce the troop commitment to Vietnam. U.S. forces were still there in 1974 when Nixon was forced to resign, but the war ended the following year. “These were not triumphal solutions,” wrote Thomas, “but they did give Americans some hope of eventual escape from the two quagmires.”
Somebody, please, get us out of this quagmire. Kerry, where are you?
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