"I cannot escape this thought after listening to Mr. Bush on Monday night: he will become, once the bombs start dropping on Baghdad, a baby killer, a child killer. And he will have inflicted on our military service people the consciousness that they, too, are baby and children killers. Murderers of harmless people. Not collateral damage. The best way to support our troops is to bring them home before they become murderers of the innocent.And why is it okay to inflicts "day[s] of horror" on another people just in case their leader should somehow, someday in the future, manage to accumulate the apparatus to inflict a "day of horror" on the people in the United States? Why are our lives considered to be more important than the lives of people living in Iraq? Quite simply, our lives have no more value than theirs.
I see the beginnings of our own civil war: a war between the authorities and the people demonstrating for no war. Our country does not have a worthy leader in Mr. Bush. Our country has what one commentator described as a "militant messianic" leader. Pretty poor choice for a country renowned for its freedom from religious coercion.
Is this what the United States really stands for? The right to decimate whatever country our leaders choose? Not my United States of America."
One of the feelings I have is an immense pity for those soldiers who are doing the shooting and bombing and are having to live with the knowledge of the death they are dealing. And pity for the clueless and what some people call "mad cowboy" soldiers that don't have the compassion to understand.
I read the Washington Post's reporter's eye-witness account of the shelling of the people in the van that didn't stop because no warning shots were actually fired (a report that was ignored or whitewashed by many other newspapers and the Defense Department) and the description of the mother-still alive-holding her two dead and mutilated children and the sickness expressed by at least a couple of the soldiers after seeing the dead and wounded.
And I know what I wrote in that letter about soldiers becoming murderers of the innocent comes true every day that they are there.
I listen to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now interviewing reporters -unembedded- describing Baghdad, read the reports on Common Dreams from newspapers outside the U.S. of a hospital being bombed in a town near the Syrian border, the people in another town in the south that's been the focus of fighting coming out with horrible stories of the dead and wounded civilians.
Then the Denver Post prints stories from embedded reporters, and they tend to be about thankful Iraqis who are friendly to the soldiers, or Iraqi soldiers giving themselves up, some saying they had been forced to fight or be killed. There is plenty of fear of the Republican Army/Baathists' retribution. And there is the crux. I'm against this pre-emptive war, this illegal war, this war undertaken for many hidden and not-so-hidden agendas. Yet here it is in front of us, begun, eating up billions of dollars we can't afford, killing many things: human beings, souls, friendships, good will, and love, along with decimating the education of our own children and the services required by our own elderly by draining money from our states, cities, and counties.
Our government has rolled us onto the plains of Abraham and made a promise to the people of Iraq of freedom (although it strains credulity to figure out just what our government means by "freedom" with Ashcroft in the house). I presume it means out from under the fist of Hussein and the Baathists. If that is not accomplished, I dare not even imagine what would happen to the Iraqi people if Hussein remains there (even if he's not alive, his reach might remain long).
So, while I am against this war, I am also for a peaceable resolution which removes that iron fist, but I don't even know what its shape could be. Exile would seem to be the only answer. (Remember Idi Amin? I don't remember how he got exiled, but he did.) I don't see any entity with any power working towards such. The United Nations seems to be inept at getting out there and working at birthing a cease-fire. I can't remember if there are 160 or 190 nation in the General Assembly, but 30-odd nations in the "axis of the willing" is a pretty small percentage either way and you'd think the remainder could do something as a group. If the U.N. plans to recreate itself as the world's arbiter, it needs to be far more active and vocal than it has been these past two weeks, where the only reported activity was reactivating the oil for food program. Unless, of course, it is doing such stuff under the level of the reporterial radar.
On one of the interviews I heard last month, someone said that 65,000 Vietnam veterans have committed suicide, more than were killed in action. Will they be recognized with a wall? (I haven't tried to verify that figure.)
Over 200,000 Gulf War I veterans are sick, nearly a third who served over there. Bush and the Republicans plan to cut Veterans benefits in the 2004 budget. How's that for rewarding our soldiers for their putting their lives on the line for this administration? Talk about being treated like mercenaries. Nothing's changed in the processes of the military since the atomic bomb testing in the 1940s. It still takes decades to get the military to own up to the fact that the materials they choose to use poison our own soldiers and the testing ranges in the United States, along with the other people and lands that they are used against.
Depleted uranium is a radioactive hazard that atomizes upon impact and blows where the wind wills and settles into the dirt. It is also part and parcel of the American tanks that soldiers work and live in. It is used in the shells, bombs, and ammunitions. And soldiers are being poisoned by it. And it mutates DNA. (Children born to Gulf War veterans have an above-average birth defect rate.) And there has been no publicly-reported or acknowledged environmental or human assessment of its use. And there's a bill in Congress that would exempt the military completely from the oversight of the public by no longer requiring any environmental impact assessments of their testing ranges and bases.
The community that changes the world is us. Small letters, no periods. It's us reclaiming the goodness of humanity; it's us living the consciousness that leaders serve their countries and the inhabitants therein, not rip them apart in greed and power-hunger. It's us who believe that 'those without' have equal rights with 'those with.' In this country's basic two party system, it's taking back the party that used to be for the 'people without,' so that there is once again a choice available when we vote. If you haven't read Thom Hartmann's article on taking back the Democratic party, it's good and it's on Common Dreams. I'm sorry if those who support third parties are offended by this, but until we change elections from winner-take-all to a run-off system, the power to effect change resides in this current two-party system. Let's have the Greens and the progressives take charge of the Democratic party and bring lots of fresh air and honesty into it. And promulgate true compassion for those who have little or nothing and deserve, at the very least, a dignified living.
Cherie