Americans aren’t frustrated about Iraq, as the President says. They are appalled:
While no one knows how many Iraqis have died, daily tallies of violent deaths by The Associated Press average nearly 45 a day. About half of them are unidentified bodies discovered on city streets or floating in the Tigris River.
The United Nations estimates about 100 violent deaths daily. The Iraqi health minister last week put civilian deaths over the entire 44 months since the U.S. invasion at about 150,000 — close to the U.N. figure and about three times the previously accepted estimates of 45,000 to 50,000.
In morgues across Iraq where capacity stretches beyond thin, bodies are even being turned away.
“We have to reject them,” Hadi al-Itabi of the morgue in Kut, southeast of Baghdad, said he told men who turned in the bodies of six slain border policeman last week. “We just don’t have enough cold storage.”
Iraq’s bureaucracy of death is overwhelmed.
Like the President, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) thinks that Americans are just discouraged. McCain used the word “frustrated” or its variation seven times today in his appearance today on Meet the Press in talking about Iraq and the midterm elections.
The Republicans’ attitude on this is the same now as it was before the elections: if Americans would just buck up, we could win this war.
