The price of freedom

Freedom, as we’re told, isn’t free.  Of course that trope is a nice cover for the real meaning, which is: we’ll tell you what it costs.  For the US, Iraqi Freedom has cost almost 3000 lives and that’s not counting the 10,000 lives at least half of which are irrevocably changed by severe injury.  To talk about the monetary cost seems almost an insult to these people and to their families.

But of course the word Freedom can be defined in many ways.  George W. Bush would like to define it as the holding of an occasional election held under heavy guard to choose officials who can’t actually influence the process of governing a country in civil war and occupied by foreign infidels.  Your opinions may vary.

A survey mentioned in today’s New York Times estimates that at least 600,000 Iraqis are indisputably free thanks to Bush War II.  They are dead.  Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health used “samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.”

The Military disputes the number although it has not released any data of its own and any data concerning Iraq is suspect in my opinion, when it emanates from a government that seems never to have told us the truth about Iraq from the beginning of George W. Bush’s ascension to the throne.  

But even if the estimates are way off; if the real number is 300,000 for instance, or perhaps 200,000 – can you imagine the mood of the American people had a city of 300,000 like Tampa or Pittsburgh or Buffalo or St. Paul were annihilated by foreign invaders?  What if that figure is accurate and Boston were massacred in the chaos following an invasion (for our own good of course) and the entire country had little running water or electricity and it was too dangerous to go out to shop for food?

Is it so hard to remember the fat faces that told us we would be greeted as liberators; that there would be few casualties, that there would be little cost, that freedom isn’t free?

Remember the President that fired anyone who disagreed with his fantasy, who slandered and libeled and got rid of anyone who questioned his fatuous fiasco?
In less than a month we have the opportunity to exercise what’s left of our freedom. They may hack the voting machines, they may play games with the ballots, they may unleash a tsunami of slime, but we have a chance and perhaps the last chance to stop this madman and his henchmen. It may be inconvenient to go out and vote, it may be raining, it may be cold, it may snow and you may have important things to do, but freedom isn’t free and this may be the last time we can afford it.