Our waste of 4,000 very good American lives was not "for Israel" but for both Iran that viewed Saddam as the instrument of the "Great Satan" US (Iran fed Chalabi the lies that he used to con us into going to war) and for George Bush #43 getting revenge on Saddam for trying to get a "hit" on George Bush #41.
It was not "war for oil" or politics but pure revenge.
The STUPIDITY of our State Department and CIA is that they didn't learn from Yugoslavia that when you have disparate cultures forged together by a criminal despot, when the despot dies all hell breaks loose as in Bosnia, Serbia, and all of the other pieces. Even Dick Cheney (Darth Vader) said in 1991 that if you got rid of Saddam would bring about a tremendous problem of creating a stable society to replacing his criminal infrastruture. In comparing Cheney to Darth Vader, most people still fail to realize the rest of the metaphor is that George Bush #43 is Darth Sidius.
And for the fools and fundamentalists who think our country can do no wrong, my "cred" is being a former Vietnam era Army Officer, life-long Republican (who trusted Bush #43 the first time and had no other choice the second time - Kerry is a bigger jerk), and Scoutmaster whose oldest son has had two tours in Iraq. If our country was a democracy based upon truth and law and order, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld would be in jail for "high crimes and misdemeanors."
Obviously we have learned NOTHING from the deaths of 56,000 good Americans in the Vietnam war.
At Last
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Mass terrorist bombings caused the greatest death, and by the summer of 2004 the carnage was beyond description. My translator and I would go to a hospital looking for victims of the day's blast, and an orderly would accidentally take us to one of the wounded from the day before. "Sorry," I'd feebly explain, "But we need one from today." I recall, as the mayhem turned routine, interviewing a doctor in the Yarmouk Hospital emergency room while a janitor absent-mindedly squeegeed bloody water over our shoes in his rote effort at cleanliness. I learned how to approach the doors of the refrigerated morgues to count the bodies without drawing hostility from the families shrieking with grief.
Of course, my Iraqi staff and friends lost loved ones so often that, I'm ashamed to say, I began avoiding personal conversations because I felt so helpless trying to console them. I guess caring less was my own act of denial. Fortunately five of my former translators have prevailed, at least by Iraqi standards. They safely fled to California, Kuwait, Canada, Sweden and Syria.
American officials tried to marginalize the Iraqi experience during much of the war. Former administrator Paul Bremer used to acknowledge horrific attacks by saying there would be "good days and bad days." Administration boosters would accuse reporters of focusing too much on the violence. Military spokesmen withheld statistics on attacks and casualties, as if the war were their own private club. Or they told us, absurdly, to ask Iraqi officials because they were in charge (when we did that, U.S. spokesmen sometimes claimed militia quislings in the government were exaggerating the figures). Back home, administration opponents would write off the violence as inevitable, just "Iraqis killing each other." Rather, it was--and still is--mostly armed groups killing noncombatants. It's the Sunni car bomber incinerating Shiite marketgoers, followed by Shiite militias murdering random Sunnis who are unrelated to the bombing.
Iraqis noticed the distance between them and the Americans. One translator, a perceptive man who sympathized with U.S. troops, told me they exuded fear and helplessness in their city-size fortresses. Frequently, Iraqis told me they wanted to notify soldiers about dangers in their neighborhoods but had no way to reach them.
Denial and misunderstanding cost American lives, as well. As the insurgency grew, the wide popular support for the "resistance" was obvious. In that first summer, I could go to Fallujah or western Baghdad and meet with fighters in their apartments and homes while neighbors stopped by and their kids played around us. Still, officials discounted the increasingly deadly attacks as signs of insurgent "desperation." Soldiers rode around vulnerable in their canvas-covered Humvees. Recently, a commander at the Army's counterinsurgency academy reminded me that the school didn't open until late 2005 because the Army spent nearly two years debating whether there even was an insurgency. Now attendance is required for incoming combat officers.
Commanders are turning the priorities around. Led by Gen. David Petraeus--a few others like Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli had emphasized it before from less powerful posts--the military now says that protecting the Iraqis comes first. Many soldiers have left the big bases to live in houses where Iraqis, as I saw recently south of Baghdad, can invite themselves in with little more than a brief pat-down. In Hawija, a longtime incubator of insurgency, troops discussed ways they could safely let motorists closer to their convoys so as to not anger people by tying up traffic. While detentions still pull in too many innocents and sew hatred, last month I watched young soldiers in Arab Jabour break into a spontaneous debate about the evidence they had on a prisoner seated cuffed and quiet before them. They let him go the next morning after running the case past an informant. Their young Iraqi interpreter had touched off the discussion when he told them he hated detaining people "whether he is terrorist or not."
Discuss