A letter from a soldier’s mother about the forceful extension of Iraq duty

This is a letter from a mother in Puerto Rico:

One night last April, I was unable to sleep. My future daughter in law had alerted me to an extension of stay to 20,000 US soldiers so that they would remain in Iraq indefinitely. On the international channels, I saw faces of US soldiers (compungidos?) - among them I searched for, with my heart in my hands, the face of my son. Intuitively, I knew, his silence confirmed it. Right now JJ is in a non-specified place; he has been in Irak now for over 15 months and does not know when he will return. He goes wherever they send him, alert, while Mothers against the War protest the reasons behind this immoral and unjust war that is affecting all of us in so many ways.

We ask ourselves, the same way the US Congress questioned last April 22, if the Bush Administration has provided the North American people with a real description of the costs of the war. That day, President Bush proposed a budget of $401.7 billion for the next fiscal year. Senator Joseph Biden indicated that they need at least an additional $60 billion just to maintain the troops that are already there. General Richard Myers, president of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, indicated that the cost of maintaining those 20,000 soldiers in Irak costs $700 millions every three months. And among those soldiers is my son.

Let’s look at the actual costs: To this day, the war has cost the American tax payers $118,136,731,012.00. That amount, calculated by the same congressional appropriations, would be sufficient to feed the world population for four years, add an additional 2,250,229 teachers and fund 16,702,554 children in pre-school programs for two years. This amount costs $419 per person and $1679 per household in the United States.

Wars affect all of us, but, in particular, the dispossessed. Those that declare wars are the rich and powerful and those that fight them are the sons of the poor, the U.S. minorities, the unemployed those that have the illusion of having academic benefits and employment opportunities. Oh!, but your son went as a volunteer. Being a volunteer is relative given the conditions of unemployment in our country.

If we look at the human costs, there are no words that can describe the anguish that mothers and family members of the soldiers feel, the pain of knowing that this is an unnecessary conflict, when a report from the investigative commission on the September 11 events states that ". . . there is no credible evidence that Irak and al Qaeda cooperated in the attacks to the United States." The final report will be published in July. For now, at least 45,000 Irakis have died, besides the emotional toil, costs to the property and material wellbeing.