Saturday night, General Tommy Franks was at the NRA’s annual banquet, and he kept shooting his mouth off.

First, he ridiculed the other generals who’ve been criticizing Rumsfeld, saying they are publicity hounds who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Then, amazingly, he minimized the U.S. lives that have been lost in Iraq, a number that now stands at more than 2,440.

Said Franks: “What we’re talking about is neither 2,400, 24,000 or 240,000 lives,” he said, adding, “Terrorism is a thing that threatens our lives.”

For Franks, there appears to be no outer limit of American lives he’s willing to dispense with in this Iraq War, which had nothing to do with terrorism in the first place except as a pretext.

Franks’s chilling comments were right in keeping with things he’s already said before.

Here are two of his classics, during the Iraq War that he led.

One, “We don’t do body counts.”

Why should he, when he doesn’t care?

And two, when a general beneath him raised the question of casualties if the U.S. rushed to Baghdad, Franks reportedly put his hand over his mouth and yawned.

It’s not such a yawner, though, to the loved ones of those 2,440 soldiers.

And if the body count rose to, God forbid, 24,000 or 240,000, it wouldn’t be a yawner, either.

The vast majority of Americans already say that the costs of the Iraq War already outweigh the benefits.

Tommy Franks and his commander in chief can keep discounting those costs.

But they aren’t burying their loved ones.

Matthew Rothschild has been with The Progressive since 1983. His McCarthyism Watch web column has chronicled more than 150 incidents of repression since 9/11.

© 2006 The Progressive

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