Paying the Price

The incomparable Daily Kos was one of the first blogs I ever read. It's now a community of 20,000+ registered members, with hundreds of thousands more stopping by regularly to read it.



Markos, the founder of the site, is a U.S. Armed Services veteran; he was also an early, and vocal, opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and dKos was one of the sites around which opposition to the war coalesced. The dKos bloggers (Markos, his designated guest bloggers, and the diaries that can be written by any registered user) have been tracking both the runup to the war, and its consequences, all along. And the consequences just keep getting worse.



The service men and women in Iraq have an amazingly high survival rate, thanks to improved medical techniques. But that means they are surviving with horrific, life-long injuries (warning: graphic photo). We need to see these images; we need to understand that the damage being done is not an abstraction. And the costs, financial as well as human, of this unjust, ill-conceived clusterfuck of a war will be with us for generations. The immediate costs of the war are bankrupting our economy, and the long-term costs can only be guessed at.



If this were a just world, most of the Bush administration would be under indictment now. But it isn't, and we will all have to pick up the pieces of what's left of the world when they're done with it.