Iraq II: When the Shoe Is On the Other Foot

Please pause to take a look at the photos of these young men before reading on. They're Kristian Menchaca (left) and Thomas L. Tucker.

Menchaca hailed from megalopolis Houston, Texas. He was a high school dropout but earned his general equivalency diploma before getting married in January and shipping out to Iraq.

Tucker was a resident of tiny Madras, Oregon. He loved to sing and play the piano.

Look into the eyes of these two shy young men. Then look outside the window wherever you are. Take a deep breath as you look at the trees, the backyard swimming pool or whatever the scene may be. Look hard and take a deep breath, or maybe give your bride a hug, if you have one, or play something on the piano, if you have one. Because Kristian Menchaca and Thomas L. Tucker will never have those opportunities again.

The bodies of Menchaca, 23, and Tucker, 25, both privates first class, were found on Tuesday.

Menchaca, Tucker and Specialist David J. Babineau had been sitting alone in a Humvee when they were attacked by insurgents at their traffic checkpoint in the Sunni stronghold known as The Triangle of Death on the 17th day of the third month of the fourth year of the war in Iraq, the war that President Bush tells is getting better every day. Babineau, 25, of Springfield, Massachusetts, was killed in the attack.

Both Menchaca and Tucker were victms of what Defense Secretary Rumsfeld smugly refers to as "coercive interrogation techniques" when Americans are wielding the whip.

They had been torture and beheaded.

What should the official United States government response be to these acts of savagery? As of 7:30 p.m. EDT, there had been nary a peep from the White House, so how about this:

That's okay. They were only glorified traffic cops. Besides which, we use torture, too.

LAST THROES, MY ARSE

Perhaps Vice President Cheney, that great champion of torture, can take some time out from duck hunting to invite himself to the homes of the Menchaca and Tucker families and tell them face to face what he repeated this week -- that the Iraqi insurgency is in its "last throes," as he first infamously said in May 2005.

In defending his statement, the always unapologetic Cheney explained that:

If I look back on something that I underestimated, it would be the extent to which that society had been damaged by that series of events that had occurred over 30 years during Saddam's rule.

I sure know that I underestimated -- or misunderestimated, as his boss says -- what a vile person Dick Cheney is.

THE BATTLE OF THE FALSE COMPARISON

Politicians make false comparisons all the time, but the penchant for President Bush's flunkies to compare the war in Iraq and a wee dust-up familiarly known as World War II is not only inane, it dishonors the veterans of that great conflict.

White House mouthpiece Tony Snow was at it the other day in comparing the Mess in Mesopotamia, which as noted is in its fourth year, to the Battle of the Bulge, which lasted six weeks. Sayeth Tony:

The president understands people's impatience — not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation. He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, "Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?" But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.

But then what the heck, Bush has made it clear that although the war is getting better every day, he's revealing himself as a coward for the ages and dumping the whole fricking mess on a successor. A successor whom I predict will retire the WW2 analogizing as one of his first official acts.