Coming home — disillusioned. US Marine Corps captain speaks out.

[LynnTheDem]

Three years ago, I was a Marine Corps captain on the Iraqi/Kuwaiti border, participating in the invasion of Iraq. Awestruck, I heard our howitzers thunder and watched artillery rockets rise into the night sky and streak toward Iraq — their light bathing the desert moonscape like giant arc welders.

As I watched the Iraq war begin, I completely trusted the Bush administration. I thought we were going to prove all of the left-wing antiwar protesters and dissenters wrong. I thought we were going to make America safer.

Regrettably, I acknowledge that it was I who was wrong.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2002925025_snomarine12.html

An honorable, patriotic man.

:patriot:

[RobertSeattle]

1. Already on Greatest Page

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x930599

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

2. Simply stated and

to the point. Will it help turn the tide of apapthy and ignorance in the majority of Amereicans? I hope so.......

[donkeyotay]

3. I dub a new logical fallacy: The fallacy of the smoking memo

There's a theory out there that reasonable people await evidence before coming to any unpopular conclusions, and paranoids engage in conspiracy theory conjecture instead of awaiting evidential permission to question accepted truth.

Respectible people wait for the smoking memo that absolutely proves their case before they are willing to speculate... or course then it's not speculation. The case must be proved before they move. Great if you're on a jury. Not so good if you're trying to figure out whats really going on in a secretive government. We should not speculate on whether the elections were stolen, until and unless we get a smoking memo. We should not speculate on whether the case for war was cooked, until and unless we get a smoking memo.

This man admits that he thought war dissenters wrong because what they said was not enough to make him doubt what he thought he knew to be true. He dismissed their lack of proof without which he could not even entertain that they might be right.

When our access to basic facts about our government is blocked, we must postulate theories and look for patterns and circumstantial evidence to support them. We do not know with certainty that we are right. We are not prosecutors in a court of law. We are citizens under a secretive government, and like Soviet citizens, we have to learn to make educated guesses about what our government is doing. We may be wrong, but it is equally wrong to surmise that everything our government tells us is true because we have not been given a smoking memo to absolutely repute what they say. If more Americans had been willing to risk being ridiculed and had actually engaged in speculation rather than await a smoking memo about the truth of the government's case for war, we would not have this:

I now know I wrongfully placed my faith and trust in a presidential administration hopelessly mired in incompetence, hubris and a lack of accountability. It planned a war based on false intelligence and unrealistic assumptions. It has strategically surrendered the condition of victory in Iraq to people who do not share our vision, values or interests. The Bush administration has proven successful at only one thing in Iraq — painting us into a corner with no feasible exit.

I will never trust any of them again.