“The tragic results of war...”

January 19, 2005
by Rob Lafferty

This past holiday season, nearly 900 children in America found more grief than joy in their homes. Each one had a parent killed in Iraq. Ten of those children lost their mother. Forty are infants, too young to understand their loss because they have never met their fathers. Now they never will.

Why did their mother or father die? For what cause did their parent sacrifice their family’s future? We cannot stop asking ourselves those questions, because these children will spend all their lives asking the same questions.

They will hear many justifications for the military action that caused their loss. Most of those reasons are based on known lies and tragic incompetence by the Bush administration, but they are still being used.

Other answers they will hear have a patriotic ring to them, but are meaningless phrases – “Your father gave his life for freedom,” or “Your mother died fighting terrorism.”

All of the ever-changing excuses given by George Bush for invading Iraq end with his mantra that “America will be safer” because of his illegal and immoral act of war. Anyone who believes that false promise is either naive about, or complicit in, one of the greatest crimes in American history.

The hard, true answer is a simple one. We, the American people, allowed our soldiers to be sent off to fight and die in a foreign land for no acceptable reason. Collectively, we are just as responsible for the destruction of Iraqi cities, and for the death of both soldiers and innocents, as the men and women who made the plans and issued the orders.

We elected a president and vice- president who have been privately planning a military invasion and occupation of Iraq for more than a decade. When that truth became known, not enough of us spoke out in opposition of their quest for geopolitical glory.

We went along with the horrible concept of asking American military personnel to kill and die in pursuit of Empire and a New World Order.

We elected senators and representatives who sanctioned this carnage with their votes. Like us, many of them believed the lies we were told, lies that put fears for personal safety into our hearts, and the fear of losing their positions of privilege into our elected officials.

So we sent our soldiers off to die, in blind support of our “leaders” and to ease our own nameless fears. We carry that guilt together as a sovereign people.

Adding to the tragedy, soldiers who come home from war are still treated poorly by the government that ordered them into battle. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, nearly 300,000 veterans are homeless. Most of them Vietnam vets; many fought in the Gulf War as well.

Some soldiers returning from Iraq suffer from the effects of depleted uranium; others from post-traumatic stress disorder. Many find they have no place to live; others cannot live with the memories of what they experienced.

In a recent interview with Democracy Now!, Herold Noel, who served in Fallujah last year, left the Army and is now homeless in New York City, described his personal view of the nightmare in Iraq.

“There was just a lot of slaughter and death. That’s all. Children would be on the streets getting caught in the crossfire. I seen children get run over by tanks,” said Noel.

“The minute we hit Iraq, we knew we wasn’t welcome. ‘Cause we were getting ambushed every day. We had kids shooting AK’s at us, even twelve-year-olds, eleven-year-olds shooting AK’s at us, rushing our trucks, trying to get food off the trucks. It was – it’s hard for me to talk about it.”

During a December 20, 2004 press briefing, President Bush spoke of the impact that violent resistance aimed at the US military and those who work with them was having on the Iraqi people. “Car bombs that destroy young children or car bombs that indiscriminately bomb in religious sites are effective propaganda tools,” he said.

He didn’t speak of the impact that American bombs dropped from airplanes have had on Iraqi families. Neither he nor any of his official spokespersons have ever truly acknowledged the death of many thousands of innocents in any way, except to describe them as “collateral damage” or “the tragic results of war”.

They will not admit that most of the human beings who died as a result of American bombs falling on residential neighborhoods did not deserve such a fate.

Immoral acts of war don’t happen only on the battlefields. Late last month, the editors of the Washington Post accused the Bush administration of committing war crimes in the military prisons of Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. They insist that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lied when he said the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was an isolated event.

Citing government documents, the Post editors said, “The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false,” and added, “The documents also confirm that interrogators at Guantanamo believed they were following orders from Mr. Rumsfeld.”

Although many people criticize Rumsfeld for his apparent insensitivity, and for making arrogant statements regarding his own policies and conduct towards the soldiers he sends into battle, George Bush continues to defend him as “...a good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes.”

Even if Bush has the true measure of Rumsfeld’s feelings, it doesn’t really matter what is in a person’s heart – their behavior is what counts. The deliberate act of sending soldiers into battle for no good cause and without proper support is what matters, not how anyone claims to feel about doing so.

All of this behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people – in your name, in mine, in the name of our children. Much of the responsibility for the continuing death and destruction in Iraq is being laid at America’s feet by the people of that land, and rightly so.

If we refuse to sanction any more killing, we can stop this madness. For the sake of our nation, we must.