Common Dreams: When Will We Ever Learn?

[Raster]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1224-03.htm

by David Krieger

I believe in hope and the proposition that we can build a better world through our personal efforts. But I also believe that we must make a cold, hard appraisal of where we stand if we are to achieve change for the better. We cannot avoid the reality that we enter the New Year deeply bogged down in the quagmire of war.

As with all wars, the war in Iraq is neither simple nor predictable. We are learning once again that raw military power is not sufficient to prevail, even against an opponent vastly inferior in military strength. For those of us who lived through the war in Vietnam, it is both sad and distressing that that war was not sufficient to teach this lesson to the present leadership of the United States. As with Vietnam, there is a growing unease among the people of the United States about this “war of choice” in Iraq. More than 1,300 Americans have died there and many more have been injured for life. The number of Iraqi casualties is far higher, perhaps higher than 100,000. And there is no end in sight.

The Vietnam War ended when the people of the United States had enough and withdrew their support for the war. Gradually that is happening now, but the people of the United States want to believe their leaders when they say that the war is progressing. We are living in the bubble of a myth. The media has a critical responsibility for reporting on the war as it is so that the American people can make an informed choice about continuing to send their sons and daughters to die in the cities and on the roadways of Iraq.

We should not forget that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that this is what the United Nations inspectors were telling us prior to the war being initiated in March 2003. If we want to understand why this war has gone so terribly wrong, we should not forget our failure to follow the law and procedures of the United Nations. Nor should we forget our tactics of “shock and awe,” nor the resulting dead and injured children of Iraq. I remember Ali Ishmael Abbas, the 12-year-old boy who lost his parents and other members of his family as well as his arms in a US bombing attack. Ali was not “collateral damage.” He is the Iraqi face of this war.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1224-03.htm

[OneBlueSky]

1. someday . . . hopefully in the not-too-distant future . . .

Goerge W. Bush and his cronies will be prosecuted as the international war criminals that they are . . . invading, obliterating, and occupying a sovereign nation that in no way threatened us is about as unforgivable as you can get in foreign affairs . . . these people need to pay, and pay dearly, for what they have done and continue to do . . . to Iraqis, to our own troops, to their families, to us as a nation, and to the international community . . .