age,” is the one specific phrase I can quote. Everybody here involved with PR knows that at least 12,000 have died both here and in Afghanistan since 2003. The number of wounded is ca 25,000. Many of these later die (and are not reported on public sites) and many, too many, more are badly maimed for life.

As we understand it here, Bush is going to ship off 50,000 to 100,000 more troops, mostly yanked from the National Guard and Reserve units but in smaller increments so as not to present the irate American public or Congress with a large target all at once. They have no intention of standing down and any senior officer who dares to suggest this gets the sack.

I, personally, witnessed the Camp Falcon destruction. We are here inside the growingly unsafe Green Zone, at least 13 miles from Falcon which is to the south of us were mute witnesses to the disaster last October . Terrible, heavy explosions all night from around midnight until the sun came up. Flames, smoke, and massive blasts made it impossible to sleep. And how did our PR boys handle this? They didn’t. There was an instant blackout which continues to this day. No one “unauthorized” is allowed to go near what is left of the camp and no reports of deaths or injuries (terrible burns on many we all know) are allowed and anyone stupid enough to dig into this gets only one warning. I don’t suppose they know at home that all email messages, incoming and outgoing, go through a choke point and all are read, even intimate family ones. God help the grunt who darers to criticize the collapsing situation here.

Suicides, desertions, homosexual rapes, shooting and bayoneting civilians, including children, soaring drug use and, of course, many daily terrible deaths are verboten. The rag heads are now using shaped charge small rockets that will blast any tank or HUMVEE apart, splattering the human contents across the immediate area. We don’t talk about that, do we? We also do not talk about the growing influx of members of American criminal street gangs who are now here, no doubt with Bush’s gleeful approval (viz his setting up so-called “Contractors” who are nothing more than professional killers) and they are demoralizing, and dealing drugs to, the more innocent young GIs. Nothing to be done about this filth, either.

Now, Gates wants to hint that Iran is supplying these but an unexploded missile picked up by EOD shows it was made in China!

I see in the stateside press that the rumormongers want us to believe we are going to hit Iran “pretty soon.” Not likely. We don’t have the troops but the Israelis stationed here are really pushing for us to do this. If we want real peace in the Mideast, we should “accidentally” nuke Israel (blame it on the French why not?) and then all the militant Muslims would at once shut up and go away.

On the other hand, one of my lunch friends told me this morning that his cousin in the Pentagon tipped him off that the real reason why Bush wants more troops here is to attack Iran with them when he has built up a significant force! We have Israeli intelligence and political people here inside the Green Zone, courtesy of Bush who adores them, and they have been gossiping about a projected attack on Iran (with the U.S. leading the way) The Navy is in the Gulf now and the Air Force is capable of bombing Tehran flat but whether or not the massing of ships and aircraft units in recent weeks is a presage of another suicidal and bloody useless war is not a certainty.

There is always the element of bluff here. Iran won’t budge on their atomic program and Bush goes into a foaming fury when he is crossed by anyone so one view of all these yammering threats is that George wants Iran to collapse and give him a cheap victory to drag around to show the very disillusioned American public like a very dead skunk.

Our intelligence people here know that both Russia and China have been supplying Iran with very sophisticated weaponry that could make terrible hash out of a U.S./Israeli attack but the real worry is that the Iranians might lob some major rocketry right into the Green Zone because all our top brass, and the Israelis too, are all concentrated in one spot. Of course Bush couldn’t care about this any more than he cares about the daily death lists or the thousands of permanently crippled young GIs. For sure he doesn’t care about the tens of thousands of dead Iraqi civilians or that a really bloody civil/religious war is tearing what is left of Iraq to pieces and us with it.

Sending massive naval task forces into the Gulf is pure stupidity because the entire Gulf is well within the range of new Iranian missiles and they could easily bottle the entire fleet up by closing the Straits of Hormuz. A Navy officer here was having a break with me and went over this. Our 6000 man carriers would be picked off like pigs in a pond, as he put it.

The entire Iranian side of the Gulf is very mountainous and in spite of constant overflights by unmanned intelligence drones, no one here knows if there are any rocket batteries and if there are, what they contain. It is suspected that the Russians have built dummy positions to keep our people interested and happy but since it is known that they have our spy satellites’ paths and times of overflights, they can dig, ship in missiles and whatever, unobserved.

I mentioned China. Bush is so dumb that he doesn’t realize that China gets its vital oil from Iran and is not happy with the prospect that the Jews and Bush will try to blow the country up.

Or to be more accurate, the Jews will get us to do their dirty work for them. As usual, and Bush and Cheney will trip all over themselves to accommodate Tel Aviv. “