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Commentary - May 11, 2004 - Printable Version
- We Have Seen The Enemy......
by Mark Faulk
In a war that was essentially built on catchy Hollywood-style slogans, harsh reality has set in. "Shock and Awe" has turned into pure shock, and "Operation Iraqi Freedom" has become nothing more than an empty catchphrase. This is one of America's darkest hours, a week in which an image that has taken decades, even centuries, to cultivate, has been destroyed by a few clicks of a camera. We have seen the enemy, and it is us. When the pictures of American soldiers humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners first surfaced last week, the immediate knee-jerk statement from the White House was that it was just the actions of a very few rogue soldiers. My knee-jerk reaction to the White House response: "bullshit". In no particular order, random thoughts floated through my mind. Like every American, I was repulsed and horrified, but sadly, I wasn't that surprised. We live in a country where morality has been on a steady decline for years, where Catholic priests routinely sexually abuse children (remember the Catholic Church's initial response that it was just a few isolated incidents? Sound familiar?), where high school and college students have humiliated younger students in sadistic acts of hazing for years, where Air Force Academy cadets have used the internet to organize deviant sexual encounters involving dozens of men and one woman, and on and on.
In separate incidents, athletes in Oregon, Wisconsin, Washington, Texas, Connecticut, and California, (just to name a few) have brutally sexually violated and sodomized fellow teammates, either performing the acts themselves or using bottles, coat hangers, mop handles, broomsticks, plastic knives, or any other handy instrument of abuse. There are literally dozens of confirmed cases of students being forced to strip naked and simulate sexual acts, having their pubic hair shaved, being forced to drink urine, feces rubbed in faces (pig feces is popular), and countless other cases of abuse, humiliation, and what amounts to what can only be described as rape and torture (Again, sound familiar?). Lacerated spleens, broken arms, punctured lungs, and several "accidental" deaths (mostly attributed to forced drinking binges), are just a few of the results of these vicious attacks that occur on an all too regular basis right here in the good old USA. If this is how we treat our friends and teammates, imagine how we deal with those whom we perceive to be our enemies. http://hazing.hanknuwer.com/chronology.html
With all that in mind, why should we be surprised by recent events in Iraq, and why should we believe the White House when they say it is just the acts of a few depraved individuals? This is an administration that has deceived the American people from the very beginning, lied to Congress and withheld vital information on a regular basis, and ignored evidence from the International Red Cross that they received nearly a year ago. This is an administration that routinely hides the facts until they become headlines, denies involvement even after they are implicated, and when caught, blames their failures on a few lowly scapegoats. This is an administration that manipulates the facts to fit their agenda (weapons of mass destruction anyone?), follows international law only when it's convenient, and has lawyers looking for loopholes so that they can violate Geneva Convention rules. This is an administration that, when it's military leader withholds shocking information from his president that has international repercussions, tells him that he is "doing a superb job".
This scandal will in the end shake the very foundation of the Bush Administration, it is not an abberation, it is symptomatic of an administration out of control. The Iraqi War isn't Bush's Vietnam (not yet, anyway), but in many ways, it is far worse. Vietnam was a slow, painful grind, Iraq is a rapidly declining abyss spinning wildly out of control. Our reputation has been permanently, perhaps irreparably, damaged. The Iraqi War has made our nation more vulnerable to terrorism, not safer. We have gone to a country halfway around the world, and made every Arab nation depise us by claiming the moral high ground, and then lowering ourselves to the level of the extremists. We have stirred up a hornet's nest of terrorism, and now we will be forced to face the consequences.
If anyone still claims to believe that this war was the right thing to do, they are either lying or deceiving themselves. When we are attacked, we have every right to retaliate, but we do not have the right to impose our values on the entire world, especially when the imperfections in those values have been exposed to the world, as they have the past few weeks. Here is one former President who put it in perspective:
"While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome."
The above excerpt is from an essay that appeared in Time magazine on March 2, 1998, entitled "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam", written by George Bush, Sr, and Brent Scowcroft. It was inexplicably removed from Time magazine's website last year after an online publication reprinted it on their site. http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm
In my opinion, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and before it is over, Watergate will look like a walk in the park by comparison. This scandal will ultimately extend far beyond the rank and file soldiers in the field to the highest levels of the administration, and beyond Iraq to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. As the Army Times stated in a recent editorial, ''This was not just a failure of leadership at the local commander level, this was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential - even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war.''
And that, fellow Americans, is the faulking truth.
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