As of today, Friday, May 24, 2007 the day following the vote to postpone voting on Iraq until General Petraeus's much-vaunted report in September--at which time, if he says things are as bad or worse then as they are now (which they are highly likely to be)--a new vote will go before Congress to end this war...I am going on record today to post that nine more servicemembers died today and six died on the day Congress voted on the war-funding bill, bringing the total number of men and women dead in Iraq as of today to 3,431.

On the day in September when Congress casts a REAL vote to end the war, I will post how many troops have died up to that point, and we'll do a little basic arithmetic to figure out how many men and women died from vote to vote.

This does not count the amount of Iraqis who will have died, because, for the most part, they are now killing each other, and their government is hiding the true number of deaths.  We will just accept that it will be bad.

Nor does it count the number of wounded, because the way the Army and Marine Corps counts its wounded is not entirely accurate, because many who are "blown up" are returned to duty without hospitalization, only to develop brain-trauma injury symptoms months later. 

We will, conservatively, multiply by ten. 

For every dead soldier or Marine, we will assume ten more were wounded, although the true figure is likely to be much higher.  It will have to do for our purposes.

Check back with me in September and we will do the grim math.

This is not, of course, to assume that no one would have died if by some miracle we'd've established a timeline for re-deployment, nor do I think yanking everyone off the battlefield and loading them onto super-sonic jets bound for mom and apple pie is the solution either.  I like the term "phased re-deployment" and will stick to that for now. 

Whenever that day does arrive, people will still die during that time.  Any time troops withdraw, there are casualties.  That is a given, sadly.

But by postponing a real reckoning--and in this instance, as much howling as is going on in the Democrats' direction, I believe most of our anger has been mis-placed.

For one thing, as John Kerry points out, we don't have a majority in the Senate anyway when it comes to Iraq, thanks to the Republican mole in our midst:  Joe Lieberman.

No, the person who spoke the clearest truth, to my mind, was George Stephanopolous, who was commenting on ABC News about the meeting of moderate Republicans with the president back a week or so ago.

Nowhere did I see anyone else make this point, but this is a guy who knows how these kinds of meetings go.  He said--and I'm quoting from memory and don't want to take the time to dig it up over on abcnews.com--but what he said was:

"I'm sure those moderate Republicans from the House and Senate went before President Bush, and they said, 'WE'LL GIVE YOU THIS VOTE, BUT IT'S YOUR LAST ONE.'" (emphasis mine)

In other words, they basically told him that if Petraeus has bad news in September, they will no longer be able to rubber-stamp him because their constituents would have their hides if they did.

Soon after that little meeting, Bush starts talking about how casualties will go up, and just yesterday, made a point that in August, it will be real bad because those bad guys in Iraq, those "terrorists" will want to influence the American government.

So he is already trying to manipulate how the expected bad news from Petraeus will be accepted by the American public and reported in the media.

So, basically, you have Republican moderates (don't forget disgruntled conservatives who secretly agree with Dems) who were large enough in number to GIVE THE DEMOCRATS A VETO-PROOF MAJORITY, and DELIBERATELY postponed having to do so in order to GIVE BUSH ONE MORE VICTORY.

The Democrats knew that without those moderate Republicans, there was no way they had enough votes to over-ride a veto.  Don't you think they'd have fought harder if they thought they had a shot?

But because of the moderate Republicans, who pretend one thing in front of the cameras and say something else behind closed doors, the TRUTH is that THIS BLOOD WILL BE ON THEIR HANDS. 

THEY are the ones who forced a postponement of this vote.

Not that the Dems are without blame--don't get me wrong, and it is not my wish to unleash a diatribe against them, but in all fairness, we have to consider what they had to work with, and if those guys really did go before Bush and say, "This is your last vote," then it is THEY who bear most of the responsiblity--them and Lieberman, of course.

They lacked the backbone to do what they knew was right, and chose to wait until the good general could come in and give them ammunition, so to speak.  They wanted to hide behind him when they finally broke with their fearless leader.

So we'll do a little body count of our own.  We will add up exactly how many brave men and women had to die over the summer because moderate Republicans and disgruntled conservatives like John Warner and turn-coats like Joe Lieberman and all the rest who failed to back the Democrats when they KNEW they were right...

Were cowards.