If you look at the latest dismal approval numbers for George W. Bush, it is obvious that there are now millions of Americans who know -- the theft of the 2000 election from Al Gore notwithstanding -- that a John Kerry presidency would have put the country on a far different path than the across-the-board quagmire we now have under Team Bush. And even if most of us put aside the criminal aspects of this administration such as selling out covert CIA agents for political revenge and spying on Americans without a warrant, Kerry's words as both a young Veteran and a presidential candidate continue to haunt us when we look at Iraq.
Let's just take a look at what happened over the weekend as the man who actually attacked us on September 11 -- you remember him, don't you, Republicans? Osama bin Laden? -- is apparently still podcasting threats from a Cheney-like undisclosed location and we continue to lose our bravest military people fighting in a country that posed no threat whatsoever to America.
Three U.S. soldiers
were killed Sunday in Baghdad, raising to eight the number of Americans killed over the weekend in Iraq and bumping the grim total to almost 2,400 members of the U.S. military who have died since the war started in 2003. Also in Baghdad, over 20 Iraqis died over the weekend in what the Bush administration continues to insist is not a civil war.
Meanwhile, a tape alleged to have been made by Osama bin Laden,
surfaced over the weekend and the man Bush stridently claimed he would get dead or alive over four years ago appears to still be running free and continuing to threaten our country -- hey, he got away with it the first time, didn’t he?
And so we go back to the man who would have been president.
"I know what we have to do in Iraq. We need a president who has the credibility to bring our allies to our side and share the burden, reduce the cost to American taxpayers, and reduce the risk to American soldiers," said Kerry in his 2004 Democratic Convention speech. "That's the right way to get the job done and bring our troops home. Here is the reality: that won't happen until we have a president who restores America's respect and leadership -- so we don't have to go it alone in the world."
There is no doubt that leaders throughout the world would have taken a second look at their stance on the U.S. invasion of Iraq, had we as a nation tossed Bush out on his ear and elected a president the rest of world could rally behind. In addition, there would also have been tremendous benefit in having a non-Chickenhawk, Commander-in-Chief who has actually
served in combat and knows -- unlike Bush and his toy-soldier cabal -- that every day of war is indeed hell.
"I know what kids go through when they are carrying an M-16 in a dangerous place and they can't tell friend from foe," said Kerry about a Vietnam that could easily be Iraq today. "I know what they go through when they're out on patrol at night and they don't know what's coming around the next bend. I know what it's like to write letters home telling your family that everything's all right when you're not sure that's true."
Bush and his crew don't know because, to them, war is an oversimplified abstraction and it shows in an obviously painful way.
But the most sadly poetic realizations come when you look at the old footage of the 27-year-old, Vietnam-Veteran Kerry testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
on April 22, 1971.
Kerry, then one of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War gave riveting and erudite testimony that left even critics astounded at the intellectual weight brought to bear by such a young man. And, of course, some of Kerry's honest descriptions of combat in Vietnam were dug up again by the Republican party to use against him in the presidential campaign and to smear his patriotism with words three decades old.
What is both amazing and profoundly sad is to read back through Kerry's entire narrative and see the startling parallels between what Kerry said over 35 years ago and what is happening today with the Iraq war.
"We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from."
It sounds very much like how our soldiers must feel right now, being smack-dab in the middle of a civil war and with a huge number of mainstream Iraqis identifying more with the insurgents than with the American purpose.
Kerry talked further in 1971 about being misled into the Vietnam war…
"In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom…is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
"At any time that an actual threat is posed to this country or to the security and freedom I will be one of the first people to pick up a gun and defend it, but right now we are reacting with paranoia to this question of peace and the people taking over the world."
And how much more could any of us add to that statement today? Where Kerry's generation had a war started on a lie – the
Gulf of Tonkin Incident – we have Bush misleading us into the Iraq disaster with ignored intelligence and a disingenuous, predetermined purpose.
As a Veteran, and one who lives daily with private thoughts about my own experience, Kerry's warnings about the price we and our brave men and women in Iraq will pay for a generation and beyond, is especially compelling.
"I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped. As a veteran and one who feels this anger, I would like to talk about it. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country."
Yes, this is a different generation and a different war, but the circumstances under which our soldiers are fighting today is very much the same and we will see the same degree of post-traumatic stress, alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, dysfunctional families and suicides among Iraq Vets as we saw among their Vietnam predecessors. In addition, many Iraq-war Veterans, already struggling with what they experienced in combat, will be forced into an even greater sense of despair and anger as the true nature of the deception leading to this war becomes even more apparent.
Finally, as we hear about more Iraqis killed and the horrible toll we pay in American lives as each day goes by, the Senator's words in 1971 about the terrible inability to admit and correct a massive mistake come back with astounding clarity.
"Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake.
"We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to dies in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
You can reach Bob Geiger at geiger.bob@gmail.com and read more from him at
Democrats.com.
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