When the good die young -

It is a tragedy.
It is very hard for a parent to lose a child, whether the death was before maturity or as an adult. Our friends lost their son and we will attend his funeral today. And we are sad for our friends. A premature death is so unexpected to friends and family. There are still "big holes" in the fabric of my own family of origin because of such events.
The news of death - We also have friends whose adult offspring are engaged in military combat halfway around the world. They worry. We worry. The nation is worried because - importantly - the growing loss of lives among U.S. forces (now more than 3,000) is still regularly reported in the news.
Young and old alike - And for the families in the Middle East their own people are tragically killed every day. The war in Iraq is also coming with a particularly high cost in lives of Iraqis, according to a newly released study. MyWay News carried an article (10/11/06) by Malcolm Ritter for AP, "suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates." To further quote,

A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, . . .
The timing of the survey's release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it "politics."
In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. . . "Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement. . .
An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but one respected group puts its rough estimate at closer to 50,000. And at least one expert was skeptical of the new findings.
"They're almost certainly way too high," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticized the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the Nov. 7 election. "This is not analysis, this is politics," Cordesman said.

Not to be minimized - The Washington Post's op-ed columnist, Richard Cohen wrote a particularly poignant and searing piece headlined, "Punctuated by Life and Death" (10/10/06). In it he talks about the rhetoric of war. I quote,

On the day that The Post carried a story about how President Bush had characterized the present difficult period in Iraq as "just a comma," Matt Mendelsohn called me. He is a photographer who took the pictures for a new book by his brother Daniel, "The Lost." It is an attempt to find out what happened to six members of the Mendelsohn family who perished in the Holocaust -- the family of great-uncle Shmiel Jager, "killed by the Nazis," of which almost nothing else was known. There: You went right by it. Shmiel lived between the commas.
In between those commas, of course, is the life of a man. He was scared and he was brave, he was proud and he was shamed, he headed a family and ran a business and then hid from the Nazis until he, along with four daughters and his wife, was betrayed and shot right on the spot. Don't think of the bullet as a period. It was, worse, a comma. . .
Not too long ago, I embraced the commas myself. I favored this idiotic war because I thought that the deaths of some would improve -- even save -- the lives of many. I likened the about-to-die soldiers to firemen or cops, the people we summon to risk or lose their lives for the common good. I had the common good in mind when I supported the war, and I did not expect much space between the commas. Now, the space expands and expands, one comma marching away from the other. It seems we will need room for all of Iraq. . .
Most of us yearn to escape our commas, to become something more than a profession (longtime lawyer) or resident (Washington native), to make our mark on the world. A president who has ineptly waged a foolish war instead seeks the solace of commas. It is not so much where he has deposited the wounded and dead but where he hopes he can hide from history. It can't be done, though: George W. Bush comma -- and then his failure in Iraq. The comma is his epitaph.

Those of us who have not lost a child cannot imagine it. It is among the most difficult of all adjustments to make. If you have kids, and any of them are near enough, give them hugs today. You never know what tomorrow will bring.

Tags: Iraq Bush Middle East

My "creative post" today at Southwest Blogger is a poem about wishes.