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However, my frustration remains strong with these people, and anyone else uniquely positioned to effect positive change, and doing nothing out of fear, concern for the status quo, uncertainty (as unfathomable as that is) about the correctness of the objection and more. Further, as a mom, I cannot avoid looking at it through the filter of a mother whose kids may soon be old enough to be hungered after by army recruiters. I find myself in the camp with those who will do, and say, WHATEVER it might take to keep another mother from doubling over in tears as she sits by her baby's gravesite, after some decorated soldier in dress uniform has handed her a folded flag. I saw a news clip about that about three years ago. It's never left me. That woman doubled over in her seat, sobbing, redfaced, edemic, her nose and breathing passages so swollen and distorted from crying that she was nearly suffocating. I've NEVER forgotten that. Her kid's blood is on the souls of ANY AND ALL of these people who didn't speak up.
BTW, I saw a report about that, I think it was on CNN's Headline News, incredibly, not terribly long after the war had started, and before it had become such a taboo to show soldiers' funerals on the news. There weren't many of these reports, and soon enough, every last one of them disappeared. Maybe that's another reason why this image burned into my mind. I can't get past it. That woman's agony. Sure lit a fire in my belly, though.
I'm sorry to be harsh about this. It's just how I feel, as a mom. I don't want ONE SINGLE ADDITIONAL MOTHER to go through what that woman endured, what Cindy Sheehan endured. What Pat Tillman's mom endured. What so many other mothers (and fathers) have needlessly endured.
ESPECIALLY when this shit was all known in advance.
These people KNEW. Their years and years of battle experience, war planning, strategizing, war-gaming, analyzing, their years and years of knowing IN ACTUALITY, UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL, what war is and what war does, knowing as Shinseki did, from hard personal experience, what it was REALLY gonna take to do this correctly with the American lives that have been entrusted to us to implement it. It's a slap in the face to every military family who's sacrificed a child to the war, or who is waiting nervously for that loved one to finish their tour of duty and get out of there in one piece, for these people to have known, to have been warned, to have been shown, to have experienced it first-hand, and then stand silently by and let some egotistical pansy-ass who's never seen war up close to begin with call the shots unchecked and unvetted.
It's one thing to fight a war on whose worth most of us can consistently agree and support. It's one thing to fight a war that's truly worthy, rather than a latter-day Crusade (that we've already had proven to us through centuries of history WON'T SUCCEED); or a war of aggression against an "enemy" that didn't attack us and wasn't in any shape to even try to do so anytime soon; or a war based on a waning energy resource when we should be redirecting all our attention and energy to a completely different track that takes us AWAY from dependence on the fossil fuels we're still killing for. Especially when that's where we're gonna wind up in the end, anyway, unable to depend on fossil fuels BECAUSE THEY'LL BE GONE - ALL USED UP.
It's one thing when there have been multitudes of voices from all levels of respectability, credibility, believability, relevant professions, and expertise, and ignore it all. It's one thing to repeatedly rely on a suspect source like Ahmed Chalabi who's really only in it for the money and personal power and prestige, ESPECIALLY when you've been warned that any information from him and others like him is BOGUS. It's one thing to hear warning after warning and ignore it, and stand silently by. When you're gambling with other people's lives, it's a BIG thing. HUGE thing. Those conditions demand that people of conscience speak out. And the higher-ranked and more influential and powerful they are, the greater is their obligation to speak out when there is a wrong to be rectified, especially one as serious as taking a nation to war based on lies.
Besides, how many of the stories that are now making the mainstream media - about the war AND SO MUCH ELSE that this damned bush machinery has pulled, from the libby stuff to the jamming of Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks in New Hampshire - how many of those stories DID WE ALREADY KNOW ABOUT because we cared enough to read and try to get the whole story? That information WAS out there and many of us got it back then. Sure, not many others then-enraptured by all this bushwah and the spin-cyclers and the echo-chambermaids were willing to listen. Or maybe they were afraid. AND THAT WAS THE PROBLEM. THEY WERE THE PROBLEM. They were part of the problem because they were NOT part of the solution.
THESE individuals knew the truth and they did nothing about it til now. Well, I'm glad they're speaking up now, but how many lives would not have been squandered - how many mothers would not be doubled-over, weeping over a folded flag which is all they have left of their precious sons (and daughters) if these people had spoken out earlier and stopped this madness?
That's my issue, and it's one that, as a mother myself, I cannot get around. As soldiers, these men were supposed to be the bravest. And the bravest and most valiant soldiers care the most about the safety and wellbeing of those under their command. To stand by and allow those under their command to be marched off to a meatgrinder when they KNEW it wasn't correct or smart or sensible and that they weren't going about it the way they should - to do nothing and stand by and allow that to happen, frankly I question their leadership. That's the ultimate dereliction of duty, to me.
They should have spoken up. They should have resigned in protest and made a stink about it in the press, which would have given them at least a few minutes on the nightly news. We might have been bringing this war to an end a year sooner. Or more. And perhaps we'd have several hundred fewer precious children who've needlessly died.
That said (or ranted or spewed!), I appreciate your opinion. I do see your point. I just have a very low tolerance for people whose wounds are self-inflicted. The military brass that is only now speaking out, when they knew the truth HOW LONG AND HOW MANY DEATHS AGO - are in a self-inflicted dilemma. There WERE things they could do. And they didn't. They chose not to. It's probably a VERY good thing that thinkers like you are there to remind us of the value of not looking a gift horse in the mouth when people like me go off like this. It is another view, another way. And it's reasoned and forgiving. I've argued those points about now-ex Republicans who finally see the light, too. I'm just not able to go there yet in THIS case.
Along the same lines, I predict here and now that once the bush nightmare is over, you'll have dozens and dozens and dozens of books coming out from people like Katie Couric and Tim Russert and Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer and Dana Milbank and more of the usual suspects, bemoaning the repression of the bush era and how they were cowed into not telling the truth to their viewers and readers because they were intimidated and afraid and worried about saving their own necks than telling the truth and blowing the whistle and holding these criminals accountable. You'll have ALL KINDS of mea culpa books and poor-me books about the McCarthy-ite era we will by then have come through. They'll all have somehow "gotten religion" once they think the coast is clear. All the apologists will sing the same song - we WANTED to say something but we dared not. Didn't want to stick our necks out. Didn't think we could/should. Boo hoo. Remember this prediction. You read it here first. And I won't be buying any of THOSE, either.
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