THE MAGNIFICENT 37
Marty Kaplan
Yahoo! News
HuffingtonPost.com
Thu Sep 13, 11:43 PM ET
In case you’re wondering what other nations make up the 37-nation
coalition of forces in Iraq cited by President Bush in his Oval Office
speech, you may need a scorecard.
Moldova is in (12 troops), but Tonga is out. Bosnia & Herzegovina
contributed as many as 37 soldiers in theater, but Slovakia and Hungary
have pulled out. El Salvador has stayed, but Nicaragua has gone.
Australia, yes; New Zealand, not so much. Latvia, Lithuania and
Estonia, you betcha; Denmark and Norway, gone. Mongolia is in, but
Ukraine is out. It appears that Kazahkstan’s 29 troops, and Armenia’s
46, are hanging in there, but Thailand has left the building.
For more stats, there’s always the Google.
All those troops’ lives are, of course, as precious to their families,
nations and Gods as are the lives of Americans serving in Iraq sacred
to their kin and communities and Creators. So, too, though it may be
hard for some to imagine, are Iraqi lives.
But when George W. Bush tries to bolster his case for a permanent
US military presence in Iraq by citing the splendid international
alliance he’s mustered, you have to wonder whether what he really
wants us to believe –and what he actually may believe himself —
is that the contributions he’s strongarmed from Fiji, Albania et al
are just as impressive as the 160,000 troops that his old man wrung
from the likes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France.
Sometimes it’s just too hard to suppress the suspicion that all of us
are just bit players in a delusional son’s deadly Oedipal psychodrama.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
