Paste a gold star on this, mama.

This photo from The New England Journal of Medicine shows a medical team treating the leg stumps of a soldier whose Humvee ran over an improvised explosive device in Baghdad. It is why I so ardently oppose the war on Iraq.

I opposed the war on Iraq from the time it first became apparent that George W. Bush and cohorts wanted to get us into it. Although some people say we did not know in March of 2003 that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was bedding down with Al Qaeda, we did have, in fact, some pretty Goddamn good information that indicated such was not the case. And we had some leaders who warned us about the consequences of invading Iraq. Remember Colin Powell citing the pottery barn rule: if you break, you own it? Well, we broke it and most Americans thought we should do something about making reparations. We did not think that under the presiding regime, our presence in Iraq would degenerate into an insurgency and a civil war which would kill and maim thousands and thousands of Iraqis, kill 3,000 of our own troops, and maim tens of thousands more.



You want more blood and guts? Feast your eyes on this.

This is another photo from the New England Journal of Medicine of the abdomen of a soldier hit with a high-energy rifle ball that passed through the liver.

I am a veteran. I grieve for these soldiers, but I get enraged at the dismissive and incompetent command that set them up for this, which has little to do with our security from terrorists or our intervention in campaigns of genocide.

Now, we plan to expose 20,000 more troops to this, and we can keep even bigger, more luscious scrapbooks. This is how our heroic and loyal young people are being honored.