In response to my post about war protest songs, someone I know IRL, and a very nice guy wrote: “As a veteran, I still have bad feelings about those protesters who demeaned individual soldiers returning from the horrors of war. The young men and women of those days are the PTSD patients of today.
“If you want to protest against something, take it out on the politicians who started the war.”
Far enough. The problem is that by the time the mainstream analysis catches up with the facts, it’s far too late. The American Conservative notes, “The Iraq War Was a Crime, Not a ‘Tragedy.'” Andrew Bacevich, reviewing Michael Mazarr’s Leap of Faith, rejects the author’s contention that the Iraq war was “the product of good intentions gone awry.”
As Daniel Larison points out: “Waging an illegal preventive war cannot be noble and cannot be done with ‘good intentions.’ To embark on an unnecessary war in violation of another state’s sovereignty and international law because you claim to be afraid of what they might do to you at some point in the future is nothing other than aggression covered up by a weak excuse. It is the act of a bully looking to lash out at a convenient target.
“Calling the Iraq war a ‘tragedy’ implies that the U.S. had a legitimate reason to go to war against Iraq in 2003, but there was no legitimate reason and anyone who thought things through could see that at the time.”
That would include between 12 and 14 million people who came out on February 15, 2003, “the largest protest in the history of the world.” I was in New York City where an estimated 200,000 gathered. It was so large that I never got within 40 blocks of the United Nations, the rally’s terminus point. Yet the events were largely ignored.
Now, ‘Mission Accomplished’ Is Old Enough to Drive. We’re still in Iraq. “A few people got rich, a lot of people got killed and the carnage rolls on because too many people thought it was real. My old bar friend was right. The fix was in, and still, too many forget.”
As my buddy suggested of the perpetrators of unnecessary war: “There’s a special place in hell for them.”
Vets say pardoning military service members who were accused or convicted of war crimes is an insult to those who have served honorably.
Now I Know: The Bomb Detector That Was a Dud
In the week before Gulf War 1, I did marriages for couples 25/7 for soldiers going off to war who wanted to guarantee benefits to those they loved but had not legally joined yet…..Most had a deep love for the other. But the fear was palatable and the fashion was bells in bouquets then. That meant there were brides and Maids of Honor so scared that bouquets ringing drowned out words spoken many times….I and my fellow minister spouse started doing weddings together where we would take turns being the one to firmly hug the beautiful brides while stilling their shaking hands and arms…..fear of war invaded the very flowers of the ancient ritual we were doing…I never found out whose marriages lasted and whose did not…I did have an old high school friend sustain a head injury from friendly fire that changed our lives forever…..I do know multiple deployments can tear apart the strongest joining…I know a lot about such that I wish I did not know…I know generations of returning troops with PTSD from multiple conflicts just about blew my family apart at the seams…I still worry now….how many more? How many places? How many transfers? How many years?…..
Dubya’s Little Adventure in Iraq is one of the Sins I find difficult to forgive in the many Centrist Democrats who signed off on the AUMF including Hillary and Joe Biden. They were “mislead?” Those two, Secretary of State and Vice President? No, I call BS: they ‘went along to get along” and were willing to sacrifice not only American service personnel, but to slaughter innocent Iraquis on the off chance that things would turn out … profitably… and they wanted to “be on the right side” and share in the Glory. This cynical sort of strategy is one of the things that sets the stage for the public to decide that “both Parties are the same.”