As Bush loiters - a Christmas toll

Those background stories of young men’s lives are all distinct and all the same. They’re all individuals and yet all, without exception, human beings with lives rooted in the lives of others - families, friends, enemies, companies, communities.

Provincial newspaper stories capture shreds of those lives but couldn’t possibly capture them in their totality, in the true effect of a lost life’s shock to a human ecosystem that quivers down to the uncomprehending eyebrow of a four-year-old at his father’s funeral, or that intrudes an emptiness sudden and total and astonishing on an eight or nine-year-old, whose pain isn’t yet mature enough to feel what will come with age: sorrow that doesn’t - unlike the fortune cookies’ predictions - heal with time, but only deepens.

It’s those burdens that the newspaper stories cannot convey, that all the fraternal love and camaraderie of military units cannot possibly take on, that presidents, and this president in particular with his chesty way and jarring peppiness, this president who has yet to attend a single serviceman’s funeral, think grave words in speeches alone can carry.

It is those burdens, magnified a 1,000-fold with every life lost as the president delays and prevaricates and poses for his subservient storytellers, that, gathered together in an indictment of their own, amount to a different kind of war crime that will never be prosecuted because they’re here, dispersed and diffuse all around us in small hearts and souls only solitude can grasp.

And the irony of all these lines here, these lines you’re reading now, is that they’re focused on an infinitesimally small, almost self-indulgent part of the tragedy.

We write about the lives lost, the names, the high school sweethearts, the children left behind, because these are American lives. But what differentiates them from the lives being lost on the other side, the Iraqi side, if not the most puerile and ridiculous difference - a difference of geography, of culture, of nationality, differences that have nothing to do with the human loss, to say nothing of the humanity being lost?

Here we are, mourning an American loss or two or three or four every day as if it were the limit of the unbearable. And yet two days ago, in a single bombing in Baghdad - one bomb, one explosion - 70 Iraqis lost their lives. The equivalent of a heavy month’s total losses for the American military. And that bombing was just one of several that day.

And those bombings were just a few of the many means by which hundreds of Iraqis found their end that day. What newspapers are telling those stories? What encyclopaedias of the dead will tabulate those losses, the effects on those human ecosystems? Whoever speaks of a shared humanity when an Arab dies anymore, the deaths - in Iraq, in Gaza or the West Bank, in Lebanon - being so routine, so disposably forgettable? (And none of this is nearly as bad as the disposability of African lives, which run in the millions.)

But President Bush wants to wait. He wants to delay. He wants to spend his holidays in peace. He wants us not to know what we’ve known all along.

It isn’t indecision that’s keeping him from announcing his new strategy. It isn’t infighting among his staff, or figuring out how to navigate an opposition Congress. It is certainly not the possibility that he is incubating a Lincolnesque declaration. (He had his Lincolnesque moment, on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and look where that led us.) No. What we’ve known all along is what he’s been all along, in Iraq as elsewhere. Clueless. Pointless. And now we can safely add, heartless.

His best strategy is to run out the clock on his term, to hand Iraq to the next president in the hope of making himself not be the president who lost Iraq, even as he’s been the only president, Saddam included, who managed to wreck Iraq.

And the worst of it is to know that as reprehensive as the crimes committed in the name of “freedom” or “democracy” or “security” have been, they’re not nearly as horrific as the crimes being committed at the expense of Iraqis’ and Americans’ humanity, they’re not nearly as unpardonable as the crimes that will go unspoken except in grief’s inexplicable blooms, for years to come, from their little seed in that four-year-old at his father’s funeral and that nine-year-old’s newborn emptiness. Here and in Iraq.