The War is Over, The War Is Lost...Bring Them Home
By Clancy Sigal(from "Counterpunch"
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/13/the-war-is-over-the-war-is-lost-bring-them-home/
(snip)
Military uprisings among the lower ranks have a long and fairly honorable tradition. The famous mutinies include Blighs HMS Bounty, the Indian Sepoy rising, Russian battleship Potemkin, British sailors strike at Invergordon, and lesser known mass revolts by French infantry divisions at the failed Nivelle offensive in 1917, Port Chicago in 1944 by African-American sailors refusing to unload dangerous cargo, U.S. soldier strikes in the Pacific against General MacArthur, and of course widespread GI resistance in Vietnam that broke the back of the war.
Afghanistan is an army mutiny by another name on both sides. In green on green killings, Afghan soldiers have been on a spree killing American and NATO soldiers. Now an American sergeant, on his fourth combat tour, with previously diagnosed Transitory Brain Injury, has gone postal to murder 16 Afghans including women and nine children.
Yet the army doctors at the killer sergeants home base, Joint Fort Lewis-McChord, considered him fit for combat duty and as for his brain injury was deemed to be fine.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)(snip)
Fort Lewis-McChord, in Washington state, is notorious for its cruel handling of returned combat veterans.
Its forensic psychiatry unit at Madigan Medical Center had two doctors fired for mistreatment or otherwise ignoring soldier complaints. The two included lead psychiatrist Dr William Keppler under whose leadership 285 diagnoses of PTSD were reversed because we have to be good stewardships of the governments money. Since 2010, 26 GIs from Fort Lewis-McChord committed suicide. In this crisis of violence the commands response was to lay off mental health caseworkers.
This latest GI mental explosion by the staff sergeant was preceded by increasing acts of American troop indiscipline Marines pissing on Afghan bodies, the Koran-burning fiasco, units loudly cheering indiscriminate Hellfire drone attacks on a village, etc. that an increasingly demoralized junior and midgrade officer corps has neither the ability nor will to stop.
The troops are protesting by any other means their entrapment in a no-win landscape where Washington politicians and career-crazy senior officers keep a war going beyond the limit of sanity.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)What are we waiting for, an engraved invitation to leave? It will never come as long as Karzai and his crooks-in-government and our U.S. contracting corporations can keep milking the American taxpayer.
A Rand Corporation study estimated that one in five veterans of fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan suffers from major depression or PTSD. After years of struggle, at last the public sees PTSD as a serious illness that must be attended to. How long will it take us to recognize that whats happening in Afghanistan is mutiny by another name?
FirstLight
(13,352 posts)It's one thing to have more stories about the effects of multiple tours, etc but it is another to get them HOME
can we pressure our President to do it before the election? or is he going to drag it out because he is afraid he would lose by ending this mess?
many of us thought we'd FINALLY be done over there with the killing of Bin Laden...but it's obvious that it's a profiteering racket by the MIC and their cronies by now - at the cost of: our soldiers, their families, society, the economy, not to mention our international relations and the poor people of Afganistan ...
how DO we stop it?
leveymg
(36,418 posts)Americans today are even more exceptional than ever.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Maybe that's next.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)I believe they're more frustrated than mutinous.