by Jack Dresser, Ph.D.
Capt., Medical Service Corps, USAR (1962-65)

More lost lives cannot restore lost national honor
also published by the Springfield News
 

We repeatedly hear the administration chant to "stay the course" with right-wing cheerleaders sneering at "cutting and running" as a blight on national honor, along with nostalgic references to the national engagement of World War II.

As a little boy during WWII, I remember well the food rationing and my proudly cultivated back yard “victory garden” spinach that no doubt accounts for my lifelong fondness for spinach salad. I remember spellbinding news from “the front” eloquently reported by Ernie Pyle in the San Diego Tribune and recounted in person by my favorite uncle – a bomber pilot in the Pacific theater – during furloughs when he also brought back South Pacific seashells for my collection.  I remember V-E and V-J days, and the pound of bacon fried for breakfast by my mother the day rationing ended after the war.

I also remember well the terrifying black-and-white Saturday matinee war newsreels of massive bombing that unleashed myriad explosions far below, aerial combat with the losers spiraling to earth trailing smoke, the grueling serial beachhead invasions of the Pacific, kamakaze aircraft diving headlong into our naval vessels, the concentration camps discovered upon Germany’s defeat, and the terrible mushroom clouds we were told were necessary to end the war with Japan.  I realized over those four years with the clarity of a child’s perception that war is a bizarre, horrific madness of our species that turns all civilized and biblical rules of conduct inside out.

Yes, by comparison our war in Iraq is half-hearted.  But there is a good reason for that.  In 1941, Germany and Japan were the most fearsome military powers on earth, bent on global domination and well on their way toward achieving it. Our own and all other democratic systems in the world were urgently imperilled.  There was little room for public ambivalence once the stakes were clear, even to the isolationists.

In contrast, Iraq in 2003 was a minor nation with a military crippled by 12 years of economic sanctions and seven years of U.N.-supervised disarmament.  In their 2004 Foreign Policy journal article Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked, George Lopez and David Cortright reported that Iraq’s annual military budget since 1991 had been only 10% of its pre-Gulf War levels. Scott Ritter, the chief U.N. weapons inspector until 1998, tried desperately before our invasion to explain to the American public that Iraqi WMDs were highly unlikely, that Saddam could not have reconstituted a nuclear program with his limited resources and without detection, and that Iraq was an immediate danger to nobody.

Moreover, Iraq had not threatened the United States, had no role in 9/11, had in fact been supported by the Reagan administration during its 8-year war with Iran (negotiated through Reagan’s envoy, Donald Rumsfeld), and was not identified by the State Department as a sponsor of anti-Western terrorism. Iraq was a secular Islamic state where women wore skirts, drove cars, and attended college, and was therefore strongly opposed by Islamic fundamentalist bin Laden.  Obviously, if Saddam had WMDs his sworn enemy bin Laden would be the last person with whom he would share them.  They were bitter rivals for influence in the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, these realities were largely unknown or ignored by the American public.  Mainstream U.S. media provide scant knowledge of relevant world history and cultural geography, and only a small fraction of our population reads serious books and journals. This leaves us vulnerable to manipulation by unprincipled leaders.  But despite deficient public awareness, it was the clear responsibility of our national leadership to be fully informed of relevant facts before stampeding the country into a terrible war that has cost over 1,900 American lives and well over 100,000 Iraqi lives according to the International Red Cross, the U.N., and a carefully designed, peer-reviewed study of Iraqi mortality before and after our invasion conducted by Johns Hopkins and Columbia University scientists and published in Britain’s respected medical journal, The Lancet.

Most of these deaths have been caused by violence -- primarily coalition bombing -- and most have been women and children.  During our first “shock and awe” month of high-tech terrorism alone, the Pentagon unleashed 37,000 air sorties, launched 23,000 precision-guided missiles and 750 cruise missiles, and dropped 1,566 cluster bombs with multiple warheads.  Immediately following this massive assault, the Associated Press documented over 3,400 civilian deaths recorded in Baghdad area hospitals.  These numbers of course excluded the dead who were simply buried and were limited to hospitals retaining intact records. The death and destruction we have inflicted upon Iraq – a society innocent of any injury to us – dwarfs our losses on 9/11 and vastly exceeds what the random violence of nature has recently inflicted upon the southeastern United States.

This is consistent with the facts of modern warfare.  In his book, What Every Person Should Know About War, 15-year war correspondent Chris Hedges reports that 75-90% of war deaths since 1990 have been civilians. The public, fed an endless film and TV diet of glamorized, fictional violence for decades, would be unlikely to understand this. But the Bush administration and the Pentagon were fully responsible to understand and anticipate this reality, which would explain their loudly touted myth of flawless “smart bombs” and their refusal to report “collateral damage.”  The complicit U.S. media have given scant or dismissive attention to the Lancet publication.  If the truth was fully revealed to the public, I doubt the collective American conscience would permit this debacle to continue another day.  We are not, I hope, a nation of psychopaths.

The horrors of war cannot be justified merely to promote “national interests,” not simply as the heaviest wrench in our foreign policy toolbox. It can be justified only with national survival at stake and no feasible alternative. That is, in fact, what was falsely sold to Congress and the American public by evoking the mushroom cloud image associated with Saddam as an “axis of evil” centerpiece. This image, together with the phony tales of African yellowcake and aluminum tubes suitable only for nuclear applications, created a public fantasy of grave and urgent national peril.  The additional false tale of Hussein’s unyielding intransigence – even as U.N. weapons inspectors had been re-admitted to Iraq – supported the perception of no feasible alternative to immediate war.

It was transparent to me at the time – knowing the long-held intention to seize Iraq of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the many other neoconservatives appointed to the Bush administration – that they could not allow the inspectors to proceed.  If the inspectors found WMDs, invasion would be unnecessary to find them.  If no WMDs were found, the rationale for invasion would likewise be lost.  And seizure of Iraq was the administration’s agenda from the beginning, on any manufactured excuse. This has been extensively documented by the testimony of ex-insiders as well as the declared neoconservative intentions developed by Wolfowitz and Cheney in 1992 and promoted since 1998 on their Project for the New American Century website.  They had acknowledged that “a new Pearl Harbor” would be needed, which they twisted 9/11 into providing.

We are half-hearted in Iraq because over half our population has finally come to recognize that the Iraq misadventure is an ill-conceived, falsely justified, deadly and destructive dead-end, and we have no right to be there.  As in Vietnam, honor does not come from completing a commitment if the commitment is dead wrong.  Only a just and absolutely necessary war can be won with honor.  Which is precisely why this war, and our national honor, were lost from the beginning.
 

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Copyright 2005 Jack Dresser, Ph.D.