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Remembering All Those Arguments Made 1,500 Deaths Ago |
Current rating: 0 |
by Joesph G. Galloway
(No verified email address) |
13 Mar 2005
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Just the opinion of a guy no one can accuse of being a dove... |
WASHINGTON -- Something about anniversaries prods us to pause and reflect on what's transpired in the intervening time. March 20 is the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and it's a good time to consider what's happened since then.
Do you recall our civilian leadership's rationale for a pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein? President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and, yes, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the world that the United States had no choice but to invade Iraq. They said Saddam was hiding chemical and biological weapons, and that his scientists would be able to produce a nuclear weapon in a few years.
Do you remember those who predicted that the operation would be financed in large part by sales of Iraqi oil? It would be cheap, easy and, oh yes, so swift that civilian leaders in the Pentagon ordered the military to plan to begin withdrawing from Iraq no later than the summer of 2003.
There was no need for much post-war planning because there wasn't going to be any post-war. America would come, conquer and get out. If Iraq was broken, its new government headed by the neo-conservatives' favorite exile, Ahmad Chalabi, could fix it. There would be no need for American nation-building, just some modest humanitarian aid.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's office had visions of a replay of the almost effortless destruction of Afghanistan's hated Taliban regime using precision-guided munitions, Special Operations forces with laser pointers and Afghan allies.
In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, less would be more, lighter would be better and faster would be best of all. Any Third World regime could be taken down by a few special operators and some airplanes. The Army's heavy divisions were relics of the Cold War.
When then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki reluctantly answered a senator's persistent questioning by suggesting that occupying and pacifying Iraq, an unruly nation the size of California with 25 million citizens, might require a force of "hundreds of thousands," he was mugged by Rumsfeld's minions.
Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz hastened to the Hill the next day and told the legislators that Shinseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark," and that Iraq wouldn't be nearly as tough as Afghanistan had been because Iraq didn't have the sort of nasty ethnic divisions one found in Afghanistan.
At that moment, in late February 2003, on the eve of the invasion, the U.S. invasion force of 278,000 American troops began to dwindle as someone tried to prove the job could be done with fewer than Shinseki's 200,000 troops. Call that the Shinseki Threshold.
One division's tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles bobbed around at sea for weeks and arrived too late for the attack. A second division of tanks and Bradley armored vehicles slated for the follow-up to the invasion was canceled; a third division's deployment to Iraq was postponed for several months. Military Police units needed to secure a hundreds of miles of dangerous supply lines - and to establish law and order - disappeared from the war plan.
A strike force that amounted to an Army division and a Marine Expeditionary Force, with Air Force and Navy fighters and bombers, took down Baghdad in three weeks.
But as the invasion forces regrouped, the world witnessed an orgy of looting and burning of government ministry buildings, and even the power plants upon which a city of 11 million people depended. There was no one to prevent it.
Birthing democracy, Rumsfeld allowed, can be "messy.''
After nearly 18 months, the Pentagon admitted that a team of nearly 1,000 intelligence officials and scientists had combed Iraq for evidence of chemical and biological weapons or any sign of an active nuclear weapons program. They found nothing.
This war that was supposed to be a cakewalk has taken the lives of 1,510 American troops and sent thousands more home, maimed by improvised explosive devices that tear off arms and legs.
American taxpayers have paid more than $200 billion in two years for a war we were told wouldn't cost much, if anything, and the cost in fiscal 2006 will be at least $70 billion more.
Now the administration tells us that we had to attack not because Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, but because he wasn't a democrat. Sadly, however, the costs of trying to make Iraq a democracy probably would have been lower, and the chances of succeeding better, if we hadn't gone to war with flimsy evidence and wishful thinking.
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young."
© 2005 Knight Ridder
http://www.realcities.com/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
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Re: Remembering All Those Arguments Made 1,500 Deaths Ago |
by Darrin
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Mar 2005
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The perspective is appreciated (if not obvious), but the author betrays a military mindset by failing to mention even one of the over 100,000 (?) Iraqis killed so far. |
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To End the War, Listen to Soldiers' War Stories |
by Simona Sharoni
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Mar 2005
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As the second anniversary of the war on Iraq approaches and the death toll of U.S troops tops 1500, many soldiers return to our communities. To end the war, we must listen to their war stories rather then rely solely on peace marches. This challenge requires that we step outside of our comfort zone and talk to people whose political views may differ from ours. We ought to expose ourselves to the reality of war as experienced by our friends, neighbors and coworkers. Those of us who have organized and participated in countless peace demonstrations over the years are well aware that these public displays of discontent and conviction rarely attract people who are not already sympathetic to our plight.
Yet, around the country, peace and justice organizers are busy organizing marches, demonstrations, and community gatherings for March 19, 2005, which has been declared an international day of action against the war. Invoking the massive demonstrations of millions around the world on February 15, 2003, organizers insist that it is crucial for the peace movement to wake up and send a strong message to the Bush administration and to the American public that the war must end now!
Taking to the streets in a country where too many people care more about so-called reality TV than about the reality of war, is important. People need to be reminded that we are at war and that we, individually and collectively, are responsible for the killing of as many as 198,000 Iraqi civilians, according to a recent issue of the medical journal The Lancet. But peace demonstrations and public gatherings are not enough to illustrate that reality, let alone to question the militarization of our foreign policy.
In fact, most peace activists would admit that they harbor no illusions that administration officials are going to listen, let alone end the war and bring the troops home. At best, anti-war demonstrations may re-energize the peace movement. But to avoid the paralysis that struck the movement when the Bush administration ignored the 2003 massive peace demonstrations around the globe, we must use any event marking this sad anniversary to expose the realities of war.
Rather then appealing to the deaf ear of this callous administration, we should listen to those most affected by the war in our society: soldiers who fought in Iraq and have been returning in large groups to our communities these days. We should not compete with the military or with groups in our communities that are celebrating the return of the troops home with medals, honors, and fanfare but often fail to listen to the battle tales of individual soldiers. Instead, we ought to reach out as individuals to family members, friends, neighbors and coworkers who witnessed and participated in this war. We need to listen to their first-hand horrific experiences. We should ask them to describe in as much detail as possible, what they witnessed and did in the war and what the war did to them, recognizing that for most, this was the most intense, and probably traumatic, experience of their lives.
It is not the time, nor our role, to judge or educate these soldiers. They do not need us to tell them that they participated in a futile war, nor to lecture them about the real reasons behind it. Most of them know experienced the futility of this war on their bodies, pondered the lies behind it in their minds and had to fight with anguish, frustration and fear in their hearts, whether they admit it publicly or not. Listening to these stories as difficult as they may be, will enable us to better reach out to and to communicate with those who don't yet share our sense of urgency to end this war. Further, these personal accounts, shared in private settings, are invaluable because it is such uncensored stories that the mainstream corporate media, which has been embedded with (or rather in-bed-with) military units has failed to share with the public.
The public debate that took place in this country at the height of the War in Vietnam and eventually contributed to its end was ignited as much by the soldiers who returned from the battlefield and shared their hellish stories as by the anti-war movement. By listening to the stories of soldiers who have fought in Iraq, we do not condone the inhuman actions they may have participated in, nor the war. Instead, we expose the reality of war and its devastating effects not only on its victims but on its perpetrators as well.
One of soldiers interviewed in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 states: "When you kill someone, you also kill a part of yourself." This is not a message that military recruiters share with the vulnerable youth they are trying to desperately recruit. Unfortunately there is very little we can do to undo the massive death, destruction, and human suffering caused by this war. Listening to soldiers' accounts may help us mobilize a larger segments of American society to end the war in Iraq and stop the senseless loss of life. In this dark moment in our history, soldiers' war stories have more of a chance to offset the beat of the Bush Administrations war drums then the anti-war slogans we have been chanting at peace demonstrations.
Simona Sharoni is the 2004-2005 Savage Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Oregon, where she has been conducting research on and teaching about the relationship between race, gender and militarization. A veteran of the Israeli army and a leading peace activist, she is the author of Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The Politics of Women's Resistance. webpage: www.oly-wa.us/simona |
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This War Walks Among Us |
by Norman Solomon
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Mar 2005
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In wartime, the silence of the American dead is a vacuum that the powerful in Washington try to fill. While loved ones are left with haunting memories and excruciating sadness, the most amplified political voices use predictable rhetoric to talk about ultimate sacrifices.
But the wounded do not disappear. They can speak for themselves. And many more will be seen and heard in this decade. Thanks to improvements in protective gear and swift medical treatment, more of America's wounded are surviving - and returning home with serious permanent injuries.
During the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War, 76 percent of American troops survived combat wounds. But in this century, the U.S. military's surgical teams "have saved the lives of an unprecedented 90 percent of the soldiers wounded in battle," the New England Journal of Medicine reported in December.
Back in the United States, thousands of survivors are now coping with injuries that might have been fatal in an earlier war. Many have lost limbs or suffered other visible tragedies, but often the affects are not obvious. The Iraq war is causing an extraordinarily high rate of traumatic brain injury, and the damage to brain tissue is frequently permanent.
This month the Defense Department released data showing that the official number of U.S. troops "wounded in action" in Iraq has gone over the 11,000 mark. Notably, 95 percent of those Americans were wounded after May 1, 2003.
In a bizarre echo of President George W. Bush's top-gun aircraft-carrier speech on that day, the Pentagon still asserts that the U.S. casualties since then have occurred "after the end of major combat operations."
Although the media routinely find space for reports on American deaths in Iraq, news outlets rarely convey the magnitude of injuries.
"More corpses are en route" to the United States, former Marine Anthony Swofford anticipated in late 2004, "and more broken bodies, shattered psyches, damaged souls."
Since authoring "Jarhead," his memoir of the Gulf War, Swofford has continued to probe beneath the popularized war images that drew him to enlist at the end of the 1980s.
"The romance of a combat death evaporates when combat arrives," he wrote this winter, reflecting on photos from the funerals of seven American soldiers who perished in Iraq.
"I wonder, then, when the men and women whose burials we see in these photographs lost their romantic attachment to combat, killing and death, their own death and the deaths of others. Be certain that at some point they entertained such fantasies. Perhaps only for a few days of basic training; possibly, like me, until they landed in theater."
Dead soldiers, of course, can't talk to fellow Americans about that evaporation of war's romanticized mist. But the swelling ranks of the wounded will be heard as they try to resume their lives in the cities, suburbs and small towns of the United States.
The human toll among veterans, extending well beyond those who were physically harmed, includes common chronic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: such as extreme anxiety, sleeplessness, nightmares, panic attacks, displaced rage and survivor's guilt. Families and relationships are at heightened risk of falling apart.
The upsurge of newly wounded veterans would not be so potentially explosive in political terms if the public had confidence in the rightness of the Iraq invasion and ongoing war. When so many Americans perceive that the war was built on a foundation of falsehoods, the war's architects are liable to find themselves on thinner and thinner domestic ice as time goes on. The wounded among us will be widely seen as victims whose suffering was avoidable.
Historically, mounting U.S. casualties have not stopped most Americans from supporting a lengthy war - if that war seemed justified. Throughout World War II, public support remained above 75 percent. In sharp contrast, the public's backing for the Vietnam War, with far fewer total dead and injured, spiraled downward to 30 percent.
Even at this early stage, Iraq war veterans are gradually becoming more outspoken. Robert Acosta, for example, is a 21-year-old former U.S. Army specialist who re-entered civilian life in early 2004 - just six months after losing his right hand when a grenade landed next to him in a vehicle on a Baghdad street.
"I was there, and I'm proud of my service," he said. "But I really questioned the war once I was in the hospital. . . . I feel like we - the guys who went in to do the job - were lied to."
Several months ago Acosta joined the fledgling group Iraq Veterans Against the War. He speaks with clear authenticity. "A lot of people don't really see how the war can mess people up until they know someone with firsthand experience," he says. "I think people coming back wounded - or even just mentally injured after seeing what no human being should have to see - is going to open a lot of eyes."
Founded in midsummer 2004, Iraq Veterans Against the War has expanded from eight to 150 members while organizing forums and teach-ins around the country and attracting some appreciable media coverage. The group's national coordinator, Michael Hoffman, joined the Marines in 1999 and participated in the invasion of Iraq.
"War is dirty, always wrong, but sometimes unavoidable," he says. "That is why all these horrible things must rest on the shoulders of those leaders who supported a war that did not have to be fought."
America's physical wounds from the current war cannot be tucked under the national rug. And in the long run, neither can any of the psychological pain that afflicts many combat veterans.
President Bush is likely to face a growing backlash that will further reduce his credibility - and strengthen the healthy skepticism that Americans should utilize when the president insists it's time to go to war.
Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which will be published in early summer.
© 2005 Newsday, Inc
http://www.newsday.com |
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