Normally I stay out of this kind of thread since "weapons of mass destruction" have become a sort of Pavlovian trigger for some people.   They foam at the mouth and respond, "Bush is evil! I hate him, I hate him, I hate him!" when ever WMDs are brought up. In this case all that happened was that Bush applied some self-deprecating humor to his biggest vulnerability. There are too many dead, but this is not how you show respect for them. Iraq was not only about weapons of mass destruction and it's easy to see who's really playing politics with the dead in this case.

That's not why I'm posting. All you 'Catters who are not Americans, you Brits and Canadian, all you others, look at the title of this thread and see what it's saying. 500 dead. 500 dead Americans. Have you noticed? Coalition dead don't matter. Iraqi dead don't matter. Saddam's murders don't matter. All that here matters is American blood.

This obsession with American blood is not a new thing. It's not a sign of rising Fascism, not just a conservative issue, if anything it seems (IMHO) more prevalent among American liberals. So long as we fight Clinton's kind of war where we sit a long way away and lob missiles to kill those we've decided to punish, who ever happens to be in the kill zone, everything's OK. It's like the violence in the movies and TV and video games that Hollywood insists on making, it's not real. "No Americans were killed in the making of this war" is all some need to see for everything to be all right. We don't see the dead, they don't exist. Nice and clean and antiseptic.

This is what should frighten you, not some neo-cons in the DC Beltway writing white papers and running computer simulations that ignore political and economic reality. They're too isolated from the real America to count, lost in a fantasy. That will sort itself out. Their influence will self-destruct at their next call for their kind of war.

What should keep you awake nights is that in the real America, we can make war so long as it's not us dying. We're working hard to automate our weapons, to take American crews out of our planes and tanks and ships so that we can use them whenever we want. Once we're free of that burden, who will we decide to punish next, when will one of our politicians decide to "wag the dog" to get out of a problem at home? Be honest: do you think that only one American party thinks America is always right and should tell other people what they have to do? Only one party plays politics with war?

This is the real evil at the heart of America, that some people only see half the horror of war and accept war when that half's not apparent. And look, here it is wallowing in hate again.