This was posted and marked as compiled from an Iraq War vet who was paralyzed in an ambush in Sadr City in 2004. He is now reportedly under end of life hospice care for complications from that wound. Regardless of his condition and prognosis, the points made are painfully dead on balls accurate. There are still dozens and dozens of imbeciles in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, who proudly voted to piss away trillions of dollars and countless lives on non-existent WMDs. Some have genuinely repented, but there are many who say they would vote to ‘liberate the people of Iraq’ again, some made the talk show circuit this weekend because it was the tenth anniversary of the worst, bloody foreign policy fuck up since Vietnam. Many of those same lying apologists suddenly get the vapors when anyone suggests spending a tiny sliver of that titanic sum helping ordinary Americans, including wounded vets and evicted former home owners, better endure the dire consequences of their many, many catastrophic policy blunders:
Truthdig — 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.
I’m not normally moved to violence and I understand the risks involved with threats toward public officials. But in the unlikely event I ever find myself on an elevator or in a cab with someone like Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, I might have to put my country first and begin slapping them open palmed as hard as I can while calling them disgusting lying murderers until the police drag me away.
Well, he did join a volunteer army while a war was going on. Where’s the personal responsibility?
If you follow the link he explains that quite well. In brief he joined days after 9-11 to attack the people who attacked us. If we’re going to demand personal responsbility, I think we should begin with those who are actually responsible. Iraq was not an “honest mistake” or a “failure of intelligence.” This was a premeditated carefully orchestrated campaign of lies and deception intended to leverage the horror of 9-11 and stampede an already panicked nation into a war that had nothing to do with 9-11, all because a tiny group of chicken hawks had been slobbering for it for years prior to the 9-11 attacks. One has to look no further than their famous catch phrase, Weapons of Mass Destruction. WMD was a sound byte ginned up to conflate nuclear weapons possesed by a few nations with chemical and biological agents the poorest dictator can develop or already has. The two are nowhere near the same.
I could probably cobble up a crude mustard gas in my bathroom, but even with a degree in math and physics and an intimate understanding of fissile reactions and weapons grade enrichment, I doubt I could design a working enrichment process, much less a nuclear bomb, even on paper (And btw, those who think they can and who rely on Internet material or books with purported instructions are deluding themselves. It’s much harder to create a deliverable, safe, reliable super critical reaction than the vast majority of science nerds realize. I once entertained a physics guy who was fairly knowledgable and sounded very convincing even to those with some atomic science background. He was obviously used to being able to bullshit listeners, or maybe he really believed his speil, but on this occasion he didn’t realize who he was talking to. After questioning him on how he would build and arrange basic components, like mass tampers and neutron triggers, it became clear he would have been lucky to get far enough along to kill himself, much less a million people).
WMD was one of many components in the bloody charade, it was chosen as part of the campaign to trick us into believing Iraq posed a real terrorist threat and that we had to act before the ‘smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud’ bloomed over major US cities. If we’re going to hold a soldier who was one of those taken in hook line and sinker to your standard, I think we’re going to have to demand the con artists that killed him and thousands of others be held to an even harsher one.
blormo>
what the hell do you even mean? personal responsibility? did you read the article?
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, when you enlist, you have no control over where you go, what unit you are assigned to, etc. Generally you can pick one of several ‘fields’, but even that is subject to change and reassignment.
Also- the article has a link to an interview that has a lot more info in it.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_crucifixion_of_tomas_young_20130310/
I would not be surprised at all that he believed his own spiel.
Engineering is very different from science in some aspects, and since I kind of straddle both worlds (I have done research as a chemist but I’m now a computer engineer) , I have heard misconceptions about the work and methods of both.
A scientist rarely has to concern hirself about implementation and conception of reliable devices, and has very little idea of the time and effort that goes into design and testing, and would probably not know how to even begin to do those things – I know I didn’t.
Conversely, engineers, while they use science for work, generally have very little idea of how it’s actually done. You’re given the set of equations, you use them to predict how you might do something. What interests you are the tolerances and behavior of something as related to your design.
Open handed? Oh screw that. I want a tire iron.
And dear Blormo, if you’ve ever served, you know that your superiors have responsibility to the troops. Liars like Bush and Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell, intentionally lied to their soldiers. A soldier’s calling their superiors on their lies is the best and finest personal responsibility ever.
Blormo, the United States armies may be all-volunteer, but that does not excuse assholes like Cheney or Wolfwitz using them as a Viagra substitute for their personal gain (whether financial or egotistical).
I read blormo as being sarcastic, but Poe’s law apply.
I was well aware of a government’s ability to misuse people’s patriotism when I was a teenager. But then, I was born 10 years after WWII ended, and I’m of German descent and had granduncles in the Heer. We don’t do anywhere near good enough of a job to point this out, it is all “support our troops.”