On the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, a letter from a wounded “warrior”

Reprinted out of respect and solidarity…

A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war. Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

reproduced out of respect and solidarity with Tomas Young

https://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/the_last_letter_20130318/

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Breaking: Glen Beck derides medal of Honor recipients, compares Afghanistan to the Wounded Knee Massacre. Says Obama is giving them out like Pez. Here are the facts.

Just moments ago Radio Host Glen Beck, following an interview with draft dodger, Ted Nugent, in which they mocked child victims of gun violence, accused President Obama of “giving them out like Pez,” the candies dispensed by a small toy. Beck and his on air staff, drew a comparison to the Wounded Knee Massacre of Lakota in South Dakota, december 29th 1890, resulting in the deaths of as many as 300 civilians. The army awarded 20 Medals of Honor. The army still has not withdrawn those medals. Beck attempted to couch his words, but continued with the remarks, as a means of impugning the President. Instead, his words were a direct and complete insult to the service and sacrifice of Afghan veterans as a whole, and medal of honor recipients. And once again, he was completely wrong, or worse, misleading to his audience, which has shown a penchant in the past for accepting his irresponsible and dangerously uninformed opinions without regard to the facts.

Beck and his staff further mocked the bravery of MoH recipients, saying that nearly all of the awards Obama gave were to living veterans, when in the past, according to Beck, they were given posthumously. In fact during the 8 years of conflict in Vietnam, 1965-73, there were 248 awards given, with 156 of those posthumously.

Begun during the Civil War, the nation has honored some 3400 men and women with the highest award given for bravery and sacrifice during war. There have been 7 MoH recipients from the 13 year long conflict in Afghanistan. 2 of those were awarded by President George Bush. There were 4 given in Iraq by Bush, and 2 by President Clinton for the Somalia operation, which lasted less than a year.

Glen Beck is frre to give his opinion to the wind and any street urchin that cares to listen while he pontificates from his filthy soapbox, but the public airwaves are just that. No one will take away that right. He has no constitutional right to be on the radio, particularly with this sort of irresponsible blather and partisanship.

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Full Circle: Romney VP choice is attack on the 99%

So we’ve come full, well…sort of. The Tea Party was begun to distract attention from the wholesale looting of the federal government, an effort only nominally  curtailed by resistance to so-called Social Security reform, and the Supreme Court’s upholding key provisions of the Healthcare Act. The Right, representing a menu of greedy banking, corporate and individual interests, the 1%, if you will have spent decades shrinking and narrowing the accessibility to unfiltered, non-politicized information and news, promoted a fiction that the federal government should be managed like a household checkbook. Folksy wisdom indeed. Reality it is not.

It was hardly out of some suddenly awakened national consciousness that the Bermuda shorts-Sandal and black socked and varicose veined Tea Party decried the burgeoning national debt. That might have made them believable, and even comprehensible. It might have deflected charges of partisan-ism, and even racism had they also risen against the unfunded debt-creating catastrophe of our trillion-dollar, trillion-dollar, the trillion dollar catastrophe of the Iraq debacle and Afghan War. Indeed, the cost of those wars  are estimated to be many times the price of the actual conflicts, as we now must care for tens of thousands of mentally and physically wounded veterans. The Veterans Administration and hospitals are taxpayer-funded.

But there was no such outcry from the Tea Party or the Right. Quite the opposite. Dissent against the wars, first on a moral basis and second, economically was assailed as partisan and unpatriotic. And so the creation of the Tea Party was a ruse. The creators spun innocent Americans against their own interests, and ultimately, against the interests of their nation.

The Occupy movement exposed the fakery of the Tea Party pretense. The true national argument wasn’t about the national debt. Most of that debt is owned by the government, and that debt can sink depending upon favorable trade conditions, which is what is happening now. No, the real issue was the economic devastation wrought by de-regulated banks and financial entities, a perversely bloated defense budget which primarily benefits industry and two unfunded wars. It wasn’t risky home loans going to “people who should never have gotten loans to begin with,” early 21st century code for Blacks. It was financial firms bundling those mortgages and selling their potential risk, then bundling the bundles of mortgages and selling that risk, then bundling the risk and selling the risk on the risk on the real…get the idea? And all of it ravaged the poor and middle class in this country. How did Romney put it at a press conference during the Republican primaries? “I’m not concerned about the very rich. They’re doing just fine.”

Within weeks the Occupy Movement fully discredited and overwhelmed the Tea Party fiction. Only the Right’s near absolute dominance-the status quo networks tacitly support the Right-in the media and their need to conceal continuing efforts to corrupt and loot the nation via populism has maintained that fraudulent message.

It isn’t about debt. It never was about debt or your children or grandchildren’s futures. The kids and grandkids of the wealthy and corrupt who use the Tea Party for cover already have the means to secure their future; to attend universities unsullied  by the poor and unwashed masses, to have exclusive healthcare access, to fast-track executive careers, homes and comfortable retirements to live their American dream. If there was truly an interest in solving the debt issue, there would be action towards encouraging trade reform, removing corporate incentives to play nations against each other for sub-standard wages and conditions to workers, and removing or limiting their organizational influence on government. Perhaps then we might allow the American people to decide what is in their best economic interest, and that if a company closes a factory here to set up sweatshops in Asia or Africa or Central America that they would be considered criminal enterprises and closed down.

And consumers, if they truly cared about reform, would be willing to pay a little higher for some goods. For example, it costs roughly 80 cents- that’s 80 cents for Nike to produce a $120 Dollar pair of shoes in the Vietnam factory. Call them. They’ll tell you. In April 2010 the monthly wage there was 4000 Dong, or 21 Dollars a month, a  severely sub-standard wage. By doubling, or tripling their pay, spread across the production quotas and output of that factory, that would have added another 80 cents to a doller sixty to that $120 dollar pair of shoes. The Right, of course would tell you that it would double or triple the retail value of the shoes, as they tried to argue with me on WLS radio some years back.

The point is, the Ryan choice  for VP is an effort to resurrect the Tea Party mantra, and make it the centerpiece of the Romney/Ryan campaign. They’ve said as much. This from men who accuse Obama of not having any business experience. But their plan, using their own folksy example about household debt and a balanced checkbook(apples and oranges really), would have them cutting out the kid’s schoolbooks, shutting off heat or  air conditioning in any room their not occupying and other austere cuts while they continue driving around in the gas guzzling limousine and taking fabulous 10 year-long vacations in faraway lands on their kid’s credit cards.

Full circle. Let’s see now if the American people will fall for it a second time. The answer comes this November.