1000th US Soldier Killed Since "Mission Accomplished"

Symbolically, this week in Fallujah, during the largest U.S. assault since the occupation began, we passed the tragic milestone of 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed since "Mission Accomplished."

On May 1, 2003, President Bush donned a flight suit and landed on an aircraft carrier a few miles from San Diego to declare major combat over and bask in the victory of a "mission accomplished."

During that mother of all photo ops, the president's handlers made sure that news cameras took shots of the president with the ocean in the background. If they had turned the cameras the other way, they would have seen the San Diego skyline and would have discovered that the ship stayed at sea an extra day so that the flight suit portrait could take place.

The battle for Fallujah is the same smoke and mirrors photo op, the same Vietnam mentality of destroying the city in order to save it. While the Marines take Fallujah, the insurgents have slipped off to other battles. The real winners are destruction and chaos.

Humanitarian aid groups like CARE, Doctors Without Borders and my own group, the American Friends Service Committee, have had to leave. Independent humanitarian aid is virtually nonexistent. But the official line is that things are going well in Iraq and freedom is on the march. Sounds a lot like the mission accomplished message of eighteen months ago.

Now 1,000 more U.S. troops will not come home alive and a likely 100,000 Iraqis have died due to the war, according to a study by the School of Public Health at the renowned Johns Hopkins University.

On November 2, fear trumped hope and Americans once again refused to change presidents in the midst of a war. We can say then, that President Bush's mission indeed was accomplished, the one he really cared about most: re-election.