The thing that is so sickening and disgusting about the Iraq War that George Bush created is that it is so predictable. We know that it will be grinding on endlessly, like a slow-moving cyclone, just whirling around ripping up lives, American and Iraqi alike, and leaving destruction in its wake. We also know that as sure as the sun rises and sets, the number of young American soldiers slaughtered needlessly in that conflict will pass the thousand mark in a day or two.

On one level that shouldn’t matter. The 997 American soldiers who have died in a pointless war of aggression to date are not significantly less terrible than the 1000 or more soldiers who will have died for a pointless war of aggression by tomorrow or Thursday. Any way you look at it, this is a terrible waste of young lives.

On another level though, 1000 dead soldiers is a kind of sensory threshold. The addition of a digit speaks to the enormity of the offense that George Bush and his advisers have committed, and maybe the people who have been fooled, who have been hiding from the truth, who have swallowed the lie that attacking Iraq was part of a “War on Terror,” will begin to look more closely at what is really going on.

You could see the horror of this war graphically depicted on Aug. 29, when protesters carried 1000 full-sized flag-draped coffins along the demonstration route in New York City. They stretched out more than a city block, filling the street, each one representing a life full of hope and promise, snuffed out for what? The prospect of endless slaughter and civil war in Iraq, and hatred against the U.S. for all the violence and death we have caused in that country.

And the killing and dying is not subsiding. Over the last two days alone, the U.S. suffered 13 soldiers dead—a record of slaughter since the U.S. handed over a fake “sovereignty” to a puppet Iraqi government--while 36 Iraqis died and 203 were wounded—many of them assuredly civilians caught up in this testosterone display in defense of Bush’s manliness.

This was, and remains, a war that didn’t have to happen, that serves no conceivable function, that has no attainable goal, that has no easy end, and that was begun for no other purpose than to make President Bush into a “wartime president,” in hopes that a jingoistic and frightened public would forget his record of gross incompetence as a leader. These are truths that anyone who looks at the situation clearly cannot help but see, and yet, so powerful is the blind patriotic support for the Commander-in-Chief in this post 9-11 world that Bush’s Democratic opponent in the presidential race, John Kerry, is actually saying that if elected, he sees the U.S. staying in Iraq for another four years. Excuse me, but can I introduce a note of perspective here? When the U.S. was fighting a two-front global war against two of the world’s greatest war-machines—Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan—it fought, along with Britain and the Soviet Union, to victory in a total of four years.

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