More from Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D., Lt. Col. USAF (ret.), in
Military Week:
January 6, 2007
Dead Men Walking In the fifty states, we grieve our more than three thousand dead American troops, our 400 or so dead American contractors, and our 50,000 physically and psychologically scarred Americans. Occupied Iraq surely grieves its 650,000 dead Iraqis, its millions of wounded, its 25 to 40% unemployment rate, its lost oil revenues. It is abundantly clear that these Iraqi deaths and economic crimes are not the result of Saddam Hussein's leadership. This fact is not missed by either average Americans or Iraqis.
We can certainly understand why our pimped out and bitch-slapped Iraqi Prime minister Nouri Maliki wants to quit. We wonder at the barely suppressed rage of George H.W. Bush and his team as their compromise path to save the presidency for Jeb -- if not salvage what's left of the U.S. Army -- is tasted and then quickly spat out by baby Bush. We are amazed that the tinpot politics of the strutter-in-chief and his replacement of occupation-hardened Army leaders in Iraq by uniformed apparatchiks who promise more genuflecting death and destruction for the glory of the king.
Americans, through elections, polling, activism, lawsuits and personal sacrifice, have shifted their opinion of the war in Iraq, and now overwhelmingly reject the Bush Middle East militarism. At this point, even if we could agree that the goal was really permanent bases in the heart of the Middle East, a regional Sunni political implosion, shattered Iraqi society, and escalated economic and military aggression towards Israel's arch enemy and China's future energy provider -- we would still sadly have to agree that it didn't work out, and it has been neither lawful, successful nor worth the cost.
Even cheerleading neoconservatives simper that the “war' wasn't conducted properly, with enough commitment, or appropriate enthusiasm. For them, the applicable maxim isn't “pride goeth before a fall,' but the New Testament parable of the tares and the wheat. They see the field, after all their hard work, contaminated by weeds, made ugly, unprofitable, even embarrassing. They say, “An enemy hath done this,' unable to recognize their own handiwork.
Yet, the dead men continue to walk. Bush's New strategy for Iraq will be unveiled soon, and will almost certainly include more dead men and women on all sides. In Bush's final two lame duck years, in spite of a somewhat resistant Congress and an angry American public, he will be able to achieve at least as many dead Americans in Iraq as he has since 2003. We haven't even mentioned dead Americans in the Afghan front against Iran, or the utter catastrophe that is post-invasion Afghanistan. Bush is lame indeed, but in a very real way, he will manage to continue the mayhem in the Middle East through inertia, if not by design.
The challenge is to shift the dynamic here at home, in our own prisonhouse of misplaced faith in government, our own illusions of goodness where instead there is only the now-metasticized military-industrial-congressional complex described by President Dwight D. Eisenhower nearly fifty years ago. Three generations since then, and maybe more, have disregarded, or perhaps never understood what we were paying for, in treasure and in constitutional principle.
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