FRANK RICH OF THE NY TIMES SAYS AMERICANS ARE TURNED OFF TO THE WAR

New York Times columnist Frank Rich was a guest on one of the weekend cable news shows and the topic came up about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rich, who has long been against the war in Iraq, made a startling statement.

He said you can hear people all across the United States switching to another channel when one of the cable news stations bring up anything about the Iraq war.

Rich didn't mention it, but I have heard other op/ed writers and pundits say there is "Iraq Fatigue" with Americans.

After five plus years and 4,062 American deaths and another 30,000 severely wounded, the American public is just tired of hearing about the Iraq war.

I for one don't believe for a nanosecond Americans want a victory in Iraq. To begin with, what is a victory in Iraq going to look like? This is not like other wars where one side signs a surrender. Our troops are fighting various militias and they don't speak for each other. So one militia group might give up, but that would only leave scores of others to continue the fight.

The history of Iraq dates back 1,300 years and the only time in the 1 300 years there has not been tribal war going on was when Saddam Hussein was in power. For better or worse, Saddam Hussein held the country together.

Now we have 160,000 troops in Iraq, and many of them are on their third and fourth rotation to the war torn country.

Nothing is getting better and the "surge" has been a dismal failure because only one province, Anbar, has shown any stability and that had NOTHING to do with the US military, but instead the various tribal chiefs getting together and deciding to run Al Qaeda out of their province.

The Iraq Army is at best a ragtag unit made up of people who for the most part don't want to fight their "brothers" and so you see huge defections like the 1,000 who refused to fight recently in Basra.

The Iraqi government is at best a government in name only. They haven't accomplished a single thing since getting elected four years ago. Baghdad still suffers from lack of water and electricity and there are still hundreds if not thousands of Iraqi civilians trying to escape to Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

The once proud Iraqi health care system is in shambles. Most of the best doctors have fled the country to save their families from the continuing violence.

The oil that was supposed to go to pay for the war has never materialized and the United States is paying $5.4 MILLION dollars every hour on the war effort.

Frank Rich may be right when he says the American public is turned off to the war, but I blame the media as much for that as I do anything else. The mainstream media gave up reporting on the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war a year of more ago.

Only when something really big happens like the recent shelling of the Green Zone does the media ever mention the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore.

They used to call the Korean War "the forgotten war," but IMO the new "forgotten war" is the Iraq war and its sister the Afghanistan war.

The only people who can't forget there is a war going on are our brave young men and women who every single day go out on patrols still facing IEDs, RPG attacks and an Iraq civilian population that doesn't want the United States in their country anymore.

We started this blog six months ago in hopes of bringing to readers the events from Iraq and Afghanistan the media deems are no longer newsworthy.

We have heard from many veterans and families of veterans and that is what keeps us going.

We hope to be able to continue bringing our readers the very latest events from Iraq and Afghanistan. That is the very least we can do for all those brave young Americans stuck in this quagmire and for the most part forgotten except for their families here in the United States.

Editorial comment by BILL CORCORAN, editor of CORKSPHERE, http://corksphere.blogspot.com/ and a former Cpl. (E-4) in the United States Army Combat Engineers and a Korean War veteran.