3,798 dead

San Jose Spartan Daily

Sept.25,2007
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3,798 dead Abstract:
Wild dogs bite and chew on a human corpse lying in a war-torn Iraqi street. One of the dogs grips the head in its jaws, pulls hard and trots off into an alley with the head.

"When I saw that, reality kicked in," wrote Michael James Yurchison of Ohio in an e-mail....


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Go to Article Comments in Other Articles RSS Feed Ted Rudow III,MA
Sixteen gallons of oil. That's how much the average American soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan consumes daily -- either directly, through the use of Humvees, tanks, trucks, and helicopters, or indirectly, by calling in air strikes. Multiply this figure by 162,000 soldiers in Iraq, 24,000 in Afghanistan, and 30,000 in the surrounding region (including sailors aboard U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf) and you arrive at approximately 3.5 million gallons of oil: the daily petroleum tab for U.S. combat operations in the Middle East war zone.


So the Pentagon is being transformed from protecting America's oil supply so that the "American way of life" can be preserved, as Bush's father once said, to preserving the "Pentagon's way of life" -- war. Well, there's not much difference most of the time. The Pentagon's way of life is the American way of life. And when America's way of life starts getting more expensive because oil becomes much more expensive, America will again resort to war to keep the oil flowing -- although that won't be the excuse they use. There will doubtless be some "tyrant" to overthrow, some "evildoer" with weapons of mass destruction, some "dictatorship" that needs "democracy" -- imposed by force, of course -- en route to liberating the oil fields and wells that are the real reason for the war. The question is whether Russia and China and Europe and other nations will let America seize the oil it needs when they need it too. We shall see.


Ted Rudow III,MA
Former Grad student