8 Years 4500 Casualties Later

I know I should be happy the war in Iraq is ended and the last troops officially left yesterday.  I am.  But I'm angry.  I'm angry it  in the first place. I'm angry it was sold to us with a lie.  I'm angry we  bought into the lie and I'm angry we didn't call out the perpetrators of this lie once the lie was exposed. 

I'm not the parent of someone in the military.  I am the daughter of a WWII vet and cousin of a lifer in the USAF.  I don't hate the military.  I respect the people who fight for us.  What I don't respect are the men who make these decisions, the so-called "leaders", the Masters of War:  Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush II, Tony Blair, majorities in U.S. Houses of Congress as well as Members of Parliament.

British weekly newsmagazine New Statesman, contains a well written op-ed on the legacy of the Iraq War.  Always interesting to hear how other countries view the U.S., even when they're our bed mates.

"Faces of the Dead" is a NY Times interactive visual of every soldier killed in Iraq & Afghanistan. This is what you call a reality check.

Was it worth it?   We'll be arguing this as long as we live without as much conviction as we argued about Viet Nam.  This perspective was written in 2007 but it's still relevant today; perhaps more so.

As a final note, here's the Iraqi Body Count and their latest estimates on civilian Iraqi deaths.

Dylan's Masters of War music video

Bob Dylan Still Rockin' It

I treated my husband, son and girlfriend to see Bob Dylan and Leon Russell in concert Friday night.  It was incredible.

When I met my husband, as an 18 year old "boy", he was totally in love with Bob Dylan.  Dylan was his hero, his inspiration, his poet.  We took a Music Appreciation class together in high school.  The teacher assigned a term project to pairs of teams to study and evaluate a piece of music and present to the class at the end of the semester.  Now, this teacher had classical music in mind not folk or rock and certainly not a revolutionary cause driven artist.  But we chose to work on two Dylan songs from his seminal album, The Times They Are A-Changin' .  

We did a bang up job with in-depth analyses of  "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "The Hour the Ship Comes In".  Dylan's musicality, poetry and our interpretation of his messages were the focus of our class presentation.

We received a C grade.  It was upsetting and unfair but that teacher saw nothing impressive in our work nor did he appreciate our veering off-topic, so to speak, from what he considered to be his curriculum vitae.  We just thought he was an asshole.

Dylan played neither of those songs Friday night.  But he rocked the venue and people were thrilled to see the legend in great form.  His voice is even more guttural than before and he doesn't play to please the crowd.  He "plays what he wants to play", according to my husband, and his arrangements are not as per recorded so you really have to listen to recognize a familiar song.

It was an incredible night, filled with the joy of once again seeing the voice of a generation and one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

He was and still is The Master.