We know that, since the moment President Bush stood under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln in early May 2003 and declared “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” American deaths have risen from relatively few into the range of nearly 100 a month or more. We know that these deaths have also grown steadier on a day-to-day basis like a dripping faucet that can’t be fixed. This February, for instance, there were only five days on which, according to the definitive Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, the Pentagon did not report at least one (and often multiple) American deaths.
It’s finally national news that Americans wounded in Iraq come home “on the cheap” (as Tomdispatch’s Judith Coburn reported back in April 2006). The crisis at the country’s premier military hospital, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, is already proving to be another “Brownie-heck-of-a-job” privatization scandal (with the contract to run the place having gone to a company headed by two former Halliburton execs), and the nightly network news as well as major newspapers assure us that this is just “the tip of the iceberg.”
According to a Congressional staffer quoted in human-rights lawyer Scott Horton’s “No Comment” newsletter, “This is Hurricane Katrina all over again. Grossly incompetent management and sweetheart contracts given to contractors with tight GOP connections. There will be enough blame to go around, but the core of the problem is increasingly clear: it’s political appointees near the center of power in the Pentagon who have spun the system for partisan and personal benefit. But they’ll make a brigade of soldiers and officers walk the plank to try to throw us off the scent.”
As Juan Cole pointed out recently,
“The privatization of patient care services is responsible for a lot of the problem here… The Bush-Cheney regime rewarded civilian firms with billions while they paid US GIs a pittance to risk their lives for their country. And then when they were wounded they were sent someplace with black mold on the walls. A full investigation into the full meaning of ‘privatization’ at the Pentagon for our troops would uncover epochal scandals.”
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What a needless waste!
We know that the U.S. military has been ground down; that the National Guard has been run ragged by its multiple Iraq call-ups and tour-of-duty extensions — according to the Washington Post, “Nearly 90 percent of Army National Guard units in the United States are rated ‘not ready'”–and can no longer be counted on to “surge” effectively in crises like Hurricane Katrina here at home; that the Reserves are in equally shaky shape; that troops are being shipped into Iraq without proper training or equipment; that the Army is offering increasing numbers of “moral waivers” for criminal activities just to fill its ranks; that the soldiers joining our all-volunteer military, however they come home, are increasingly from communities more likely to be in economic trouble — rural and immigrant — either forgotten or overlooked by most Americans; that these traditionally patriotic areas are now strikingly less supportive of administration policy; and that the death rate in Iraq and Afghanistan is 60% higher for soldiers from rural than suburban or urban areas. If all of this doesn’t add up to a programmatic policy of waste and evasion of responsibility, what does?
We know that, on February 11th, the day Sen. Barack Obama, in his first speech as an avowed presidential candidate, said, “We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted,” Sgt. Robert B. Thrasher, 23, of Folsom, California died in Baghdad of “small-arms fire,” Sgt. Russell A. Kurtz, 22, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania in Fallujah from an IED, and Spc. Dennis L. Sellen Jr., 20, of Newhall, California in Umm Qsar of “non-combat related injuries.” We know that on February 28th, the day that Senator John McCain announced his candidacy for the presidency on the Late Show with David Letterman, saying, “Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be. We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives, over there,” Sgt. Chad M. Allen, 25, of Maple Lake, Minnesota and Pfc. Bufford K. Van Slyke, 22, of Bay City, Michigan died while “conducting combat operations in Al Anbar province.”
We know that, while in the remote backlands along the Pakistani border with Afghanistan–an area our President recently called “wilder than the Wild West”–and in Afghanistan itself, the Taliban is resurgent and al-Qaeda has reorganized, Americans die in Iraq. We know that every Bush administration public explanation for the invasion and occupation of Iraq–Saddam’s links to the 9/11 attacks, his weapons of mass destruction and burgeoning nuclear program, the “liberation” of Iraqis, the bringing of “democracy” to Iraq–has sunk beneath the same waves that took down the President’s “victory” (a word, as late as November 2005, he used 15 times in a speech promoting his “strategy for victory in Iraq”). We know that the President’s policies, from New Orleans to Afghanistan, have been characterized by massive waste, programmatic incompetence, misrepresentation, and outright lies.
We know that the real explanations for the invasion of Iraq, involving the urge to nail down the energy heartlands of the planet and establish an eternal American dominance in the Middle East (and beyond)–in part through a series of elaborate permanent bases in Iraq–still can’t be seriously discussed in the mainstream in this country. We know that the Bush administration has never hesitated to press hot-button emotional issues to get its way with the public and that, until perhaps 2005, the hot-button issue of choice was the President’s Global War on Terror, which translated into the heightening of a post-9/11 American sense of insecurity and fear in the face of the world. We know as well that this worked with remarkable efficiency, even after the color-coded version of that insecurity and those fears was left in the dust. We know that in this al-Qaeda played a striking role — from the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which a small number of fanatics were able to create the look of the apocalypse, to the release of an Osama bin Laden video just before the election of 2004. What a waste that such a tiny group of extremists was blown up to the size of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia in the public imagination.
We know that there is only one hot-button issue left for this administration (short of a massive new terrorist attack on “the homeland”) — the American troops already in or going to Iraq or those who have already died there. We know that Senators Obama and McCain had to immediately backtrack and express “regrets” for in any way indicating that American deaths in Iraq might represent a “waste” of young lives; that, for their statements, Obama was promptly attacked by Fox News and right-wing bloggers, while McCain was set upon by the Democratic National Committee. So we also know that there is some kind of agreement across the board politically when it comes to those troops, which goes under the rubric of “supporting” them.
We know that both Senators’ statements about a profligate invasion, a disastrous occupation, and a catastrophic pacification campaign, all based on a web of lies and false (or cleverly cherry-picked) intelligence, turning Iraq into a charnel house — far more Iraqis have now died than were ever killed by Saddam Hussein — and a center for extremist activity, were promptly pegged in the media as “slips” or “gaffes” that hurt each of the politicians involved. We also know that the American people in poll after poll now say that the Iraq War was not worth fighting and the invasion not worth launching; that similar majorities want the war to end quickly, preferably within a six-month to one-year time-frame for the withdrawal of all troops with no garrisons left in Iraq.
We know that congressional representatives are generally terrified of not seeming to “support the troops”; that somehow those troops themselves have been separated from the actual fighting in Iraq, even though, for better or worse, you can’t separate the military from the mission; that, to some extent, you are (and are affected by) what you do; and that when the mission is a “waste” — or, in this case, even worse than that because it has created conditions more dangerous than those it wiped away–then any life lost in the process is, by definition, a waste of some sort as well. No matter what your brand of politics might be, this should be an obvious, if painful, fact–that the loss of young people, who might have accomplished and experienced so much, in the pursuit of such waste is the definition of wasting a life. That this can hardly be said today is one of the stranger aspects of our moment and it has a strange little history to go with it.
[Note: That history will be in part 3 of this series, “How Our Soldiers Became Hostages,” which will appear Monday. Part 1 was “A Wasted War.”]
