BUSH'S POLICY OF NOT DEALING WITH "ENEMIES" HAS WASTED BOTH IRAQI AND AMERICAN LIVES

In his speech to Israel's Knesset yesterday, Bush said that those who wanted to talk to Hamas, or to Hezbollah, or to Iran, were no better than those who appeased the Nazis and Hitler.

Yet because Bush refused to engage in diplomacy with Iraq over supposed nuclear weapons, he has personally sunk the U.S. into this ever more costly war in terms of U.S. and Iraqi lives wasted.

If it were up to Bush, there would be no talking with countries perceived to be acting against the interests of the United States. The U.S. according to the gospel of Bush should solve all of its problems with war planes and missiles.

How much longer must we be the victims of Bush's deluded and simplistic foreign policy of us against them?

BUSH'S WAR IN IRAQ KILLS NINE CIVILIANS "ACCIDENTALLY"

Today we learn that American forces in Iraq killed nine civilians in a raid south of Baghdad. Solomon Moore and Qais Mizher write in today's The New York Times that:

"American forces said Sunday that they had accidentally killed nine Iraqi civilians and wounded three in a strike aimed at militants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia south of Baghdad, acknowledging what appeared to be one of the deadliest cases of mistaken identity in recent weeks."

This is what happens in war. And this is a primary reason why Bush and Cheney should face serious legal charges of war crimes. They are responsible for starting an unnecessary and unjustified war in Iraq. Reasonable people could have predicted that hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi children and civilians would be targeted albeit accidentally and killed by U.S. soldiers. Bush as the "commander-in-chief" gave the orders to initiate the invasion and prosecute this war.

To minimize the importance of these civilian casualties as "collateral damage" is to say that Iraqi lives are not worth as much as American ones. Imagine if it were your husband, your wife, your child, your mother, your father, who happened to be one of the nine civilian casualties.

STOP THE WAR IN IRAQ.

PETRAEUS FIGURES ON IRAQI CIVILIAN CASUALTIES BEAR NO RESEMBLANCE TO THOSE OF AP OR IBC

I found these charts on TPM Muckracker showing numbers for civilian casualties in Iraq for 2006 and 2007. They bear no resemblance to the figures offered today by Bush's military spokesman, Gen. David Petraeus. The numbers come from the Associated Press and from "Iraq Body Count," a British organization. In both the AP and IBC, it is crystal clear that the civilian casualties in Iraq are up over 2006 FOR EVERY SINGLE MONTH.

And on Talking Points Memo, David Kurtz plots out on a graph the numbers given today by Petraeus. Where has Petraeus obtained his figures? For every single month this year, the Petraeus figures show lower civilian casualties.

So whom to believe? Petraeus who works for Bush and whose neck is on the chopping block to show the "surge" is making progress? Or the Associated Press and IBC?