The Universal Soldier

The war in Afghanistan is providing the patriotic press in "Blighty" with some "wonderful" material and with the press concentrating wholly on the dead young British soldiers it is the bigger picture that the public in the UK might be losing sight of. Today there were two more British soldiers killed and that brings the total of dead to 20 this month alone. Nevertheless, with 'Democracy Now' reporting that "Four US troops died Monday in a roadside bombing in eastern Afghanistan and at least thirty US soldiers have died so far this month, making it the deadliest month for US forces since the war began nearly eight years ago,"(1) there is a very real bigger picture. If we add to those Americans, the dead Canadians, Poles, Dutch, Germans etc. and, let's not forget, the thousands upon thousands of dead Afghani men, women and childre, then we can begin to fathom the very big bigger picture. This is a war that is causing thousands of deaths, that cannot be won and that is being fought for reasons very different from those that the young men from the United Kingdom, United States and elsewhere are supposedly dying for.
1 http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/21/headlines#1