somewhere under the sky

the numbers

well. the US death toll in iraq and afghanistan has surpassed that of 9/11.
and the iraqi death toll. i read a statistic that i don't remember well...someone please correct me on this but i believe in the past 3 months, iraq has experienced a death toll equivalent to that of 9/11 each month. this seems outrageous but that's the point.
i know you're not supposed to measure the success or failure of war in numbers. but what are these numbers? lives. what are lives? a life is a birth, childhood filled with toys or hunger depending on your area of the world, but a childhood nonetheless, with parents or aunts or uncles or grandparents and games and being rebellious, learning to walk and then talk and maybe to read and write and so on. a life is the images, thoughts, feelings, and memories of a unique passage through time on this earth. friends, jokes, smiles, broken hearts, a life is alive-it moves and breathes and talks and sees and thinks. and then it's gone. this moving, breathing, laughing bundle of life is gone in a second, a bomb or a bullet. the life is gone, its thoughts, feelings, memories, and laughter lingering somewhere in the smoke, a vague fog that eventually rises and evaporates into the atmosphere forever.
these are the lives, these are numbers these are the US dead in the iraq war and operation enduring freedom. and these are the many thousands more of iraqi lives. do we have justice now? are we satisfied?
has anyone really thought about this name "war on terror?" there is something so wrong about waging a war on terror.
war IS terror.
can you conquer war with war? this is not a rhetorical question. the answer is no. fighting war with war produces war, and a neverending bloody mess. and the numbers rise and rise and rise.

posted by leah v @ 2:49 PM