BRATTLEBORO — With the current economic crisis looming so large in our daily lives, let us not forget that the war in Iraq still continues. President Obama's plans for withdrawal still call for tens of thousands of troops to remain for years. As of Feb. 28, 4,253 U.S. soldiers have been killed in the war. And a recent analysis of studies by John Tirman in The Nation show that the number of Iraqi civilian casualties is around 1 million, with up to an astonishing 5 million orphans and 4.5 million Iraqis displaced without knowing when or if they can return to their homes.
And with Obama promising to beef up the American presence in Afghanistan, it would be prudent to remind ourselves that more than 1,000 of the NATO Coalition troops have already been killed in that conflict and that the pace and ferociousness of the fighting there is on the increase. That country is in such a state of instability that it is not possible to get any accurate sense of civilian casualties. But the news reports from Afghanistan indicate that the growing number of civilian casualties is only making our presence there more problematic and therefore dangerous to our soldiers.
Whether they are on our mind or not, these two wars continue all day, every day. And the true costs to our nation won't be fully known for years.