All of a Sudden, Iraq Is Off the Table?

What's missing from our radar screen?

PEJ

I mean, the above graph does not even represent the total NEWZ. None of this flack has to do with today's domestic mass terrorism (9 dead) in Omaha, courtesy of the NRA; the missing snowboarders courtesy of the storm in the Northwest; the death of Southern rap innovator 'Pimp C' at the age of 33; the arrest of 'Canoe-Man' five years after his official death; late-nite TV hosts paying their own writers out-of-pocket; Mr. & Mrs. Dennis Quaid suing a major pharma over an overdose to their twins! None of this non-political non-news is a factor for the table that produced this chart.

This chart tells us that nothing of material concern has happened in Iraq in the last 24. This graph ignores all news from Iraq, good or bad.

Such as (in no particular order):

• Five British families are appealing to the Shia kidnappers for the safe return of their sons.
• US State and Defense Departments are tightening rules for security mercenaries and contractors.
• US Military Deaths in Iraq have reached 3,886.
• 1,100 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq in November.
• The cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq is projected to be $1.9 trillion (in 2002 dollars); and is now running at $6 billion a month or about $200 million a day, (according to the CBO), and increasing about $200 million a day.
• New Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is pulling the entire Australian deployment out of Iraq.
• Giving up on attaining any progress toward political cohesion through cajoling and bankrolling Iraqi politicians cowering in the Green Zone, our occupying forces are now betting on subsidizing and retaining all tribal level volunteers, vigilantes, bounty-hunters, privateers, gangsters and militias with their hands out for a grubstake.
• The newest and latest surge being the exponential growth of Sunnis expelled from Syria, returning at a rate faster than they can be serviced by the NGO's. (1.5 million are yet to return.)
  

(I hope some reader who is knowledgeable can supply me with the required number of 0's and commas to numerically represent $1.9 trillion.)

The point is, we are not at war. Not in Iraq, anyways. Maybe in Afghanistan (sometimes referred to as the 'forgotten war'), where war in the form of self-defense and retaliation was mandated upon us by the attacks of 9-11. Maybe we ought to be at war with the self-afflicted militarist occupation of our own country. (There's a thought.)

But we are not at war in Iraq. If we were, Iraq would be front-page, or front-of-the-hour news 24-7. My fellow Americans would be sucking our multi-media's spigots for each little morsel of news we could get. But the truth is, instead of warfare for glorious victory, our insanely brave, professional and competent troops have been assigned to a grinding, toiling, pointless, hopeless and endless task of policing a hostile nation. Forcibly occupying a hostile nation is the most inglorious of all missions to which troops can be assigned.

That is why our misleaders don't want Iraq and Iraqis spoiling our nightly news. They are not embarrassed. But they know the American people are increasingly embarrassed. Soon, their embarrassment will exceed the guilt of their earlier compliance. So our own occupiers, the Busheney junta, is unbelievably grateful for the premature opening of the American political primaries (the more 'debates' the better) and for all the Hugo Chavez's, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's, Vladimir Putin's and Pervez Musharraf's of the world. Anything to deflect the glare of the spotlight away from the scene of their original crime in Mesopotamia.

If it's not on teevee, it's not happening. Out of sight, out of mind.