Home > Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home
Edito Wars and conflicts International USA
By HOWARD ZINN
We must withdraw our military from Iraq, the sooner the better. The reason is simple: Our presence there is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people.
It is a strange logic to declare, as so many in Washington do, that it was wrong for us to invade Iraq but right for us to remain. A recent New York Times editorial sums up the situation accurately: Some 21 months after the American invasion, United States military forces remain essentially alone in battling what seems to be a growing insurgency, with no clear prospect of decisive success any time in the foreseeable future.''
And then, in an extraordinary non sequitur:Given the lack of other countries willing to put up their hands as volunteers, the only answer seems to be more American troops, and not just through the spring, as currently planned. . . . Forces need to be expanded through stepped-up recruitment.’’
Here is the flawed logic: We are alone in the world in this invasion. The insurgency is growing. There is no visible prospect of success. Therefore, let’s send more troops? The definition of fanaticism is that when you discover that you are going in the wrong direction, you redouble your speed.
In all of this, there is an unexamined premise: that military victory would constitute success.''
Conceivably, the United States, possessed of enormous weaponry, might finally crush the resistance in Iraq. The cost would be great. Already, tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have lost their lives (and we must not differentiate between ''their'' casualties and ''ours'' if we believe that all human beings have an equal right to life.) Would that be asuccess’’?
In 1967, the same arguments that we are hearing now were being made against withdrawal in Vietnam. The United States did not pull out its troops for six more years. During that time, the war killed at least one million more Vietnamese and perhaps 30,000 U.S. military personnel.
We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and again, so that we can bring stability and democracy to that country. Isn’t it clear that after almost two years of war and occupation we have brought only chaos, violence and death to that country, and not any recognizable democracy?
Can democracy be nurtured by destroying cities, by bombing, by driving people from their homes?
There is no certainty as to what would happen in our absence. But there is absolute certainty about the result of our presence — escalating deaths on both sides.
The loss of life among Iraqi civilians is especially startling. The British medical journal Lancet reports that 100,000 civilians have died as a result of the war, many of them children. The casualty toll on the American side includes more than 1,350 deaths and thousands of maimed soldiers, some losing limbs, others blinded. And tens of thousands more are facing psychological damage in the aftermath.
Have we learned nothing from the history of imperial occupations, all pretending to help the people being occupied?
The United States, the latest of the great empires, is perhaps the most self-deluded, having forgotten that history, including our own: our 50-year occupation of the Philippines, or our long occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) or of the Dominican Republic (1916-1924), our military intervention in Southeast Asia and our repeated interventions in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala.
Our military presence in Iraq is making us less safe, not more so. It is inflaming people in the Middle East, and thereby magnifying the danger of terrorism. Far from fighting ’’there rather than here,’’ as President Bush has claimed, the occupation increases the chance that enraged infiltrators will strike us here at home.
In leaving, we can improve the odds of peace and stability by encouraging an international team of negotiators, largely Arab, to mediate among the Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and work out a federalist compromise to give some autonomy to each group. We must not underestimate the capacity of the Iraqis, once free of both Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupying army, to forge their own future.
But the first step is to support our troops in the only way that word support can have real meaning — by saving their lives, their limbs, their sanity. By bringing them home.
Howard Zinn is author of the best-selling A People’s History of the United States.
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiheral...
related article- interview with Howard Zinn
Forum posts
26 January 2005, 15:48
Bring them home? Send some more.
Untill they start coming home in body bags by the hundreds or thousands, the mothers and fathers won’t get it. Please see: Operations Research Technical Manual TM-SW7905.1
ENFORCEMENT
FACTOR I
As in every social system approach, stability is achieved only by understanding and accounting for human nature (action / reaction patterns). A failure to do so can be, and usually is, disastrous.
As in other human social schemes, one form or another of intimidation (or incentive) is essential to the success of the draft. Physical principles of action and reaction must be applied to both internal and external subsystems.
To secure the draft, individual brainwashing / programming and both the family unit and the peer group must be engaged and brought under control.
FACTOR II — FATHER
The man of the household must be housebroken to ensure that junior will grow up with the right social training and attitudes. The advertising media, etc., are engaged to see to it that father-to-be is pussy-whipped before or by the time he is married. He is taught that he either conforms to the social notch cut out for him or his sex life will be hobbled and his tender companionship will be zero. He is made to see that women demand security more than logical, principled, or honorable behavior.
By the time his son must go to war, father (with jelly for a backbone) will slam a gun into junior’s hand before father will risk the censure of his peers, or make a hypocrite of himself by crossing the investment he has in his own personal opinion or self-esteem. Junior will go to war or father will be embarrassed. So junior will go to war, the true purpose not withstanding.
FACTOR III — MOTHER
The female element of human society is ruled by emotion first and logic second. In the battle between logic and imagination, imagination always wins, fantasy prevails, maternal instinct dominates so that the child comes first and the future comes second. A woman with a newborn baby is too starry-eyed to see a wealthy man’s cannon fodder or a cheap source of slave labor. A woman must, however, be conditioned to accept the transition to "reality" when it comes, or sooner.
As the transition becomes more difficult to manage, the family unit must be carefully disintegrated, and state-controlled public education and state-operated child-care centers must become more common and legally enforced so as to begin the detachment of the child from the mother and father at an earlier age. Inoculation of behavioral drugs can speed the transition for the child (mandatory). CAUTION: A woman’s impulsive anger can override her fear. An irate woman’s power must never be underestimated, and her power over a pussy-whipped husband must likewise never be underestimated. It got women the vote in 1920.
FACTOR IV — JUNIOR
The emotional pressure for self-preservation during time of war and the self-serving attitude of the common herd that have an option to avoid the battlefield — if junior can be persuaded to go — is all of the pressure finally necessary to propel Johnny off to war. Their quiet blackmailings of him are the threats: "No sacrifice, no friends; no glory, no girlfriends."
FACTOR V — SISTER
And what about junior’s sister? She is given all the good things of life by her father, and taught to expect the same from her future husband regardless of the price.
26 January 2005, 18:04
Many of the soldiers in Iraq want to be there; some are born thugs, others believe they are spreading grace, some are there to please their parents, others to piss their parents off. Whatever the individual motivations of the soldiers, the overall U.S. Iraq policy harms the U.S. citizen. We see an escalation of violence whenever the government legitimizes violence by war. While Haliburton, GE and other corporations with their few major shareholders make billions, the large majority of U.S. citizens are getting royally screwed.
My calm and measured advice to all citizens of the North American Continent is : storm the prisons, free the prisoners, overthrow the United States Governent. The US has done some beautiful things with its wealth, there have been numerous scientific discoveries and an abundance of artistic inventions. But the big picture shows a bullying, manipulative, cruel, and violent nation that must be dismembered. Yes, I am advocating the death of the United States. The United States must be replaced with a loose federation of nations, perhaps; defined, but not neccesarily, by existing state boundaries. These new nations will have no financial or military obligations to each other. The federal tax system will no longer exist, the vast war economy will whither away and tanks, battleships, and bombers will rust to harmless ruble in place. Each new nation could fund war, education, public health, as they saw fit; and after the inevitable border skirmishes, the citizens of each nation I think would soon tire of war. Even if they rather enjoyed war, confilcts would smaller, with less blood, sweat and tears spilled.
John Landon Visher, citizen of the new nation of California (Southern?)
26 January 2005, 19:57
Well...they’ll be thirty-one Marines coming home soon. It will be interesting to see how the Pentagon spins this latest helicopter crash - "accident" or "hostile fire?"
27 January 2005, 18:00
Bush said, "they died for a noble cause"...
It’s true, the soldiers would like to think that...but they know better.
"Here lies johnny, he died for a noble cause"
Ugh-huh...I’m sure that is very comforting to Mrs. Johnny.
WMD: W’s Massive Delusion
28 January 2005, 18:22
As a parent of an Iraqi veteran (the war, not the occupation) I sympathize with those who are still stuck in that meat grinder.... it will only get worse....
But America deserves exactly what it gets for re-electing a functionally illiterate corporate stooge to the White House. The 2000 election was stolen, but America bought Bush in 2004. It’s unfortunate that the young, mainly lower-class kids have to pay the price for the electorate’s ignorant behavior.
The withdrawal of American troops is up to the Iraqis to decide, after this upcoming "election" of sorts. My hope is they will immediately ask for the US to leave. My fear is the the Bush neocons will resist, and the carnage in Iraq will increase as the people there fight to end the illegal occupation of their country.
29 January 2005, 08:15
We didn’t elect Bush ever.
We shouldn’t be battling eachother. We need to rise up together and fight the enemy within.