Ten long years ago
the combined might of the US and UK military under President Bush and Prime
Minister Blair with their relationship that rode over legalities and know facts
(1) took armed action against Iraq in a “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign and a
land based invasion. In those ten years thousands of military personnel have
died. On the Iraq side an unknown number members of public have been killed.
All this was
carried out in order to stop the Iraq military from using what the US
authorities said were their ‘weapons of Mass Destruction’.
As Bush and Blair
knew, there were no such weapons.
So why start a war
and who profited out of it? George Bush’s Vice President, former CEO of the giant
US Company Halliburton, (one of the world’s biggest oilfield companies who also
have subsidiaries involved in private military contracting) Dick Cheney certainly
did.
Despite his denials
to the contrary, when special advisor to the under
secretary of defence for policy at the Pentagon Michael Mobbs stood up
to give an under-oath statement, he told how Cheney had held more than $3 million in Halliburton stock options until
sometime in 2005, and that Halliburton paid the vice president $178,438 in
deferred compensation. (2) A Pentagon Whistleblower, Bunny Greenhouse
complained, and was demoted and sacked. (3)
Halliburton’s Iraq war income actually began in 1992, before the Iraq war
started when Cheney’s Defence Department paid Halliburton $3.9 million to prepare
a classified report on privatising war logistics. Halliburton spent the $3.9
million and then were given a further $5 million for a follow-up report, and later
granted a five-year contract to provide the army with logistical support.
The Bush family made profits from the war via their many
interests in different companies, the 2006 article in (4) explains how.
Tony Blair has profited from the war (5) and I wonder where the missing Iraq $billions are? (6)
But for the vast majority of those involved in the Iraq War
there has only been despair, pain and anguish. One such Person is Thomas Young, a dying
Iraq War veteran, he wrote the letter below to George Bush and Dick Cheney, but I personally think that it should be addressed to Tony Blair as well.
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 paralysed 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 neighbours, 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 pretence 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.
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