There are some things I'll never understand. Maybe I'm just too damned dumb.

This last week, the number of casualties in the post-combat operations phase of our War in Iraq reached a number higher than those lost in combat. George Bush decried, "Bring it on!"

They did.

We are losing young men and women every day it seems, for a cause founded more in an obsolete fuel supply than in any real need to protect the American public from a known threat to its safety. We ignore the mounting losses with public statements that, "The President has declared that we will stay in Iraq until our job is done and not one day longer," and "This in no way softens the resolve of this administration to continue our efforts to train the Iraqi people themselves to suppress these attacks."

What would soften our resolve? Impeachment?

We are fighting a guerilla war we can't win, and I feel like I'm back in the late sixties here and no one seems to be doing a damned thing about it. Is it acceptable to lose a couple hundred more young American lives for a war that will no doubt be viewed as accomplishing nothing ten years from now? Do we really believe that removing Saddam Hussein is going to affect the basic view that the Middle East has of the United States and make us less prone to attacks at the hands of religious extremists? Hell, I'm more worried about the attacks of the religious extremists from within the White House, let alone the attacks from outside.

At least from the outside, you're dying without the promise that it's in your best interest.

At the same time, George Bush has declared this Protection from Pornography week.

Make love, not war.

Joseph Haines, signing off from the Edge of The Abyss.