How does this nation continue to claim that we 'liberated' the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein? The Bush cabal uses the mass graves we found as its proof that we saved Iraqis from tyranny, but we are wiping out innocent Iraqis at an alarming rate, and the deaths are mounting. Saddam was no threat before we invaded and he apparently wasn't behind any organized resistance which has claimed several hundreds of our own soldier's lives.
The numbers of those killed by our troops, threatening or innocent, are disregarded by our military and our government. The deaths of our own soldiers are rarely discussed by the president.
I'm exasperated by the new call by the cabal to re-legitimize the old Iraqi forces we shunned. They won't be any more accepting of our occupation and it's ludicrous to expect them to defend our interests there. Tonight there are reports of new demonstrations in Basra as most Iraqis there blame the recent bombing that took over 50 lives on the American force's presence. Any new indiscriminate assault that disregards civilian casualties will add to the open resentment.
In 1971 John Kerry called U.S. leaders "war criminals" for their prosecution of the Vietnam War and also that he had committed "the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers" as a naval officer in Vietnam. He rightly blamed this on the policies and direction of his leaders who authorized and ordered the assaults.
His statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 is an eerie reflection of the situation we find ourselves in today in Iraq:
In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart.
We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we had enthusiastically molded after our own image were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.
We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Viet Cong, North Vietnamese or American.
We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw first hand how monies from American taxes were used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by the flag, and blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs and search and destroy missions, as well as by Viet Cong terrorism - and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong.
We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them. We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.
We watched the United States falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against "oriental human beings." We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. We watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the hill for reoccupation by the North Vietnamese. We watched pride allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others."We watched pride, Kerry told the committee, allow the most unimportant battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn't lose, and we couldn't retreat, and because it didn't matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point, and so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 81s and Fire Base 6s, and so many others.
So, for Bush and his arrogant cabal, history repeats. Ignore history, as Bush certainly has, and we are doomed to repeat it. I pray and weep for our soldiers and I pray and weep for the innocents we are killing through our arrogant, blundering tyranny which has destroyed countless innocent lives and forever branded our country around the world as imperialistic thugs with no regard for innocent lives outside of our own selfish, prideful ambitions.
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