Given that Mr. Bush’s War on Terror (which can also arguably be called Bush’s War on Iraq as narrow-sighted as it is) has caused America’s largest ever deficit, it ought to be an easy target for presidential candidate John Kerry. At least that’s what many Americans thought back in the days when Howard Dean was packing auditoriums to hear his searing condemnation of Bush. Yet somehow Howard Dean fell from favor and we were left with John Kerry as the Democratic nominee. That’s ok, many said; he fought in Vietnam and came back home to fight against the war itself. John Kerry will be our guy. He will get us out of Iraq for the right reasons and help restore the balance so unconscionably tipped.

Yet in the months since, Iraq as a campaign issue has come and gone, fickle as the weather, while More Important Issues, like whether or not Mr. Kerry really obtained three purple hearts in Vietnam without sustaining injury, or whether or not Mr. Bush went AWOL in the National Guard, are endlessly discussed. These might be relevant issues if they weren’t 30 years old.

In between these More Important Issues, Iraq, always just below the surface, comes up for air. Like when US casualties hit 1000.

George Bush has never wavered from his you’re-either-with-us-or-with-the-terrorists line of thinking about Iraq, staying the course regardless of increasing evidence that it’s the average Iraqi now fighting America’s occupation and not Baathist “holdouts” or “foreign insurgents.” His is a fantasy world, where everything is going according to plan because he says it is. Of course, he does occasionally slip and give us a shot of reality, like when he said Iraq was a “catastrophic success,” or maybe he really believes this is good news.

John Kerry, on the other hand, has been about as solid as quicksand. He voted for the war. Later, he said he would have voted against it had he all the information he now has. Then, he said Mr. Bush did the right thing by invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein, even if it was for the wrong reasons. Now, Kerry has come out fighting—sort of.

“The president misled, miscalculated and mismanaged every aspect of this undertaking and he has made the achievement of our objective—a stable Iraq, secure within its borders, with a representative government—far harder to achieve than it ever should have been,” stated Kerry in his Big Speech on Iraq last week. His plan for Iraq looks a lot like Bush’s, except on two key points: Kerry’s plan includes getting more countries involved in the transition process (although he hasn’t addressed just how, after America has been so belligerent) and withdrawing troops instead of increasing them. The problem here is he’s talking a four-year withdrawal plan. (Sounds a lot like the addict’s promise; it’s always easier to talk about quitting when it’s some nebulous date in the future.)

Throughout the presidential campaign, when Iraq has been the subject of discourse, somehow it seems always to center on Bush or Kerry (and their shortcomings in the eyes of the other, of course). Iraq and its people, which ought to be at the center of discussion, are, instead, relegated to the backseat. Iraq is being used in the presidential debate as an election issue, where politics and polls play a larger role than what is right. When deaths are spoken of at all, it is the death of US soldiers. Rarely are Iraqis included.

What both candidates have failed to do thus far is address the very obvious—the infinitely uncomfortable facts of an illegal invasion, now coupled with an illegal occupation (so declared by even the United Nations at this point), and the continual and uncounted deaths of Iraqi civilians, for starters. Neither has addressed the multi-billion dollar reconstruction rip-off that has left Iraqis without such basics as adequate drinking water, electricity, or sewage disposal. Now, Bush has declared $9 billion more will go toward reconstruction. As if pouring more money into the pockets of certain transnationals is going to actually help Iraqi civilians. And just last week, according to Reuters, the State Department said it would divert $3.5 billion from water, sewer and other infrastructure projects to try to improve security. Perfect. This translates to the following: the Americans will use more military force to gain a stronghold in places where they can’t admit failure, like Fallujah and Sadr City, while more Iraqi civilians will die.

Neither candidate has spoken humanely about Iraq. Abu Ghraib isn’t being discussed. Nor is the international tribunal on America’s illegal invasion, set to wrap up testimony in Istanbul next March. Not that we would expect these things from Mr. Bush, but why Mr. Kerry has not made them an issue is an indication that Americans (and the rest of the world) may not be getting much of a change with him.

While John Kerry and George Bush fight their fight of words that are hardly distinguishable from one another, Iraqis are still dying at the hands of their American occupiers and the violence the occupation is fueling, and Americans are still dying at the hands of an administration that cares less about their lives than they do about being “right.”