Walter Jones, Patriot for Peace: Antiwar insurgency in the GOP

The sounds of mortar fire punctuated the American
soldiers’ words as he spoke in code over the radio: "Red on red." It was another
day of Operation Thunderbolt, now ongoing near the Iraqi-Syrian border, but the
insurgents weren’t firing at the Americans - they were battling each other.

It’s
red-on-red in America, too, as the
split in the Republican party widens: what we’re seeing is the beginning of
a political
insurgency against the war coming from the Right. As our much-anticipated

triumphant entry
into Iraq collapses into a bloody morass, and the public
begins to rebel,
those conservatives who opposed this war all along are joined by some of those
whose support for the invasion was initially vehement. Walter "Freedom Fries"
Jones, a very conservative
Republican congressman from North Carolina, has linked up with
a veritable rainbow coalition of his fellow representatives - Neil Abercrombie, a moderate Democrat;

Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican from Texas; and Dennis Kucinich, a liberal Democrat - to
introduce a resolution
calling on the president to announce by the end of 2005 a plan for withdrawal
from Iraq that would begin by Oct. 1, 2006.

Nationalist insurgents in
Iraq are fighting foreign jihadists
as well as Anglo-American

invaders, while American insurgents in both parties are
battling the bipartisan congressional leadership over their campaign to bring
our troops "Homeward Bound," as the rebels have dubbed their resolution. A year
ago, this would have been inconceivable, but in that time the American people,
and an increasing number of their elected representatives, have been getting a
rapid education in the methods and sources of war propaganda. Says Rep. Jones:

"’When
I look at the number of men and women who have been killed - it’s almost 1,700
now, in addition to close to 12,000 have been severely wounded - and I just feel
that the reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the
Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that’s all been proven that it was never there"

Interviewer
George Stephanopoulos asked him who is to blame: Rumsfeld? The president? Jones
answered:

"I think it’s primarily the neoconservatives who were advisers
in key positions in both the Department of Defense and I think that they gave
bad advice."

He "felt deceived when he was told that so-called ’neoconservatives’
in the Pentagon had wanted to invade Iraq long before Sept. 11," and he
recalls how he got "’very, very upset’ when he learned there were no weapons

of mass destruction ’and that information was manipulated to justify the invasion.’"

Conservatives
like Jones have been manipulated, lied to, and led around
by the nose, with the neocons playing Lynndie England on the
other end of the leash. Now they are rising up, demanding an exit strategy - and an explanation.
And it isn’t just Jones: Rep. Howard Coble,
a fellow Republican in the North Carolina congressional delegation, has met with
Jones and is "leaning toward
supporting" Jones’ resolution. It’s red-on-red - and the split in the GOP
over the war issue is widening. Senator Chuck
Hagel, said to be eyeing

a White House run, has joined
the chorus of Republican voices calling for a reevaluation, if not a reversal,
of our failed policy in Iraq.

"Things
aren’t getting better," says Senator
Hagel, "they’re getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from
reality. It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is
that we’re losing in Iraq."

The neocons
who sold us this

bill of goods
don’t care about reality: they don’t
even recognize the validity of the concept. Remember that White House
aide who derided critics of the Bushian foreign policy as "members of the
reality-based community"?

"We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create
our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you
will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too,
and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of
you, will be left to just study what we do."

In the past, such
people have been locked up for their own good - and ours. Today, they are
in the White House and the office
of the vice president,
where they
are busy "creating new realities." The families of the 1,700 killed and tens of thousands horribly
wounded have certainly had a whole new
reality created for them - and they don’t like it. The people of Iraq, too,
have an even harsher new reality
to contend with - and they don’t like it, either, which is why the indigenous
insurgency is growing. The American
people are less than pleased with the course of the war, and they want
out, one way or another: even the Democrats,
whose presidential nominating convention banned all
expression of antiwar sentiment, are beginning

to wake up, albeit only because they sense a political opportunity.

However,
there is no political gain for Rep. Jones - who garnered more than 70 percent of
the vote in the last election - but that doesn’t matter to him. As one colleague,
a Democrat, put it: "Walter ain’t much on watching polls. He makes up his own
mind." He is swimming against the current in his own party as well as in his own
district, which is host to three
military bases. That tide, however, may be turning. A motion condemning Jones’
position failed
to even get a second in the local board of commissioners, and Jones is unrepentant.
"If I had known that that was not true at the time we voted two years ago," he
says, "I wouldn’t have
voted to go into Iraq," and at this point the number of Republicans in Congress
who agree with him has got to be increasing.

It wasn’t poll numbers that led the North Carolina rock-solid conservative
to begin questioning the zeal that compelled him to carry the banner of pre-war
Francophobia on Capitol Hill by bullying the House cafeteria into renaming French
fries "Freedom fries." In his interview with ABC’s This Week,
Jones pinpointed his own personal tipping point:

"I went down to a Sergeant
Michael Bitz’s funeral, down in Camp Lejeune. Michael Bitz left a wife and three
children, twins that he never saw. He was killed at Nasiriya.

"And
when she attended the funeral, I remember vividly - I can see it right now in
my mind - the situation, when she read the last letter she received from him -
he left a wife and three children, twins he never saw, that were born two months
after he was deployed - and that really has been on my mind and my heart ever
since. That’s two years ago."

This
account of a directionless Bitz, who found a purpose when he joined the Marines
and turned his life around, hints at the larger tragedy that Jones has glimpsed,
and the enormity of our folly in Iraq. As Jones put it to Stephanopoulos:

"And,
George, I still - I think back to the Vietnam time, and I can’t remember it as
well as I would like to, but I think about - how about two years after Senator
Johnson - or Vice President Johnson became the president, because Senator Kennedy
had been assassinated - OK, how about if some members of Congress had said to
him, two years after he was sworn in as president, ’Let’s talk about what our
goals are in Vietnam’? That didn’t happen. There might have been one or two senators
or maybe House members, but they just stayed there until 58,000 Americans were
killed."

I would like the War Party to start questioning Walter Jones’
patriotism, as they have questioned that of every
public

figure
who has spoken out against an immoral,
illegal,
and ill-conceived
conflict. I’m waiting for David Horowitz to open his
big trap, or Christopher
Hitchens: let them dare to level the same charge of treason at Jones, who
has written letters

to the families of over 1,300 military personnel killed in Iraq. In the anteroom
to his congressional office, the faces of the war dead gaze out over entrants,
like sentries standing guard over his political conscience. When Stephanopoulos
asked if his stand has "made life uncomfortable" for him, Jones replied:

"George,
not really because you know what, I’m going to do what my heart tells me to do.
And if that means it jeopardizes my being re-elected - I can always tell you that
my daddy, who served for 26 years in the United States House of Representatives,
always told me to vote my conscience first, my constituency second, and my party
third."

Rep. Jones is hopping mad - and, as a
member of the House Armed Services Committee, he is in a position to do something
about it. He’s realized that, in his words, the intelligence that led us into
war was "manipulated" - but by whom? The neocons are in his sights, but we need
to get a little more specific than that before we can trace the path of lies that led
us into this disaster.
What is needed - nay, required - is a congressional investigation into the intelligence
that shaped the policy. We need to start naming names.

If only the
congressional Democrats who oppose this war - or say they do - would drop the
partisan blinders and combine with Republicans such as Jones, Ron Paul, and others to hold
this administration

accountable for its actions
in Iraq. For the life of me, I can’t imagine that Rep. John
Conyers, who chaired mock hearings
on the war in the House basement the other day, thought to extend an invitation
to his antiwar colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

The "Homeward
Bound" resolution is the best hope of the antiwar forces in this country,
and it is time for the grass roots to go into action. A lot of smarty-pants analysts
and wiseacre pundits aver it doesn’t stand a chance of passing. That, at any rate,
is the conventional wisdom. I would only note that no one foresaw the rapid implosion

of the mighty Soviet empire, either. Yet the Soviet colossus turned out to be
hollow, and today only its
ruins survive.

The same fate awaits us if we fail to take this opportunity
to cut our losses while we can. A hubris
greater than even the Soviets’ conceit conceived the invasion and conquest of
Iraq. Trotsky only dreamed
of invading Poland, and was kicked out of the Kremlin and exiled for his
pains: whatever gains the Commies made in Eastern
Europe and China

were made possible by their Western collaborators, at Yalta and within the U.S.
State Department - crawling with Reds,
thanks to FDR.

The Soviets’
ramshackle empire was not stable, however, and never mounted a viable threat to
the West, either militarily or ideologically. The neoconservatives, on the other
hand, have taken Iraq and unashamedly yearn for Syria
and Iran. They
may be down, politically, but they are far from out. The main hope for peace
– and a rational foreign policy - is that conservatives like Rep. Jones be allowed
to deliver the knock-out blow.

The Left has done much of the yeoman’s work
in alerting the nation to the imminent danger we face: now conservatives are stepping
forward. When will the two wings of the Peace Party in Congress unite for the
good of the nation?

A timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq
is just the first step. Beyond that, what is needed is a comprehensive investigation
that will examine, without fear or favor, the falsification of "intelligence"
by ad hoc neocon-controlled government agencies.
We need a thorough examination of what role the office of the vice president played
in vetting and shaping the "evidence" for Iraq’s WMD and alleged links to al-Qaeda.
What part did the "Office of Special Plans," AKA "The Cabal," play
– and why was Dick Cheney tootling over to Langley and standing
over analysts as they wrote their reports? Who are the Pied Pipers
of Washington, who lured Congress and the American people down the path and over
a cliff, into the Iraqi abyss?

Did they deliberately deceive us? E. J.
Dionne opines:

"The
notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty
is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility
is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda."

I
can think of much worse and far more likely possibilities, such as: they believed
their own propaganda and they lied. Isn’t that what you do when you’re
"creating reality," as that White House aide explained?

"We’re history’s
actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Let
us by all means study these "actors" who shape history to fit their ideological
agenda: let’s trace their movements, document their deceptions, and follow the
path all the way back to their origins as a conspiracy against the peace. If they
broke the law - and the trust of the American people - then they deserve to be
brought to justice.

The dead are owed that much.

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6392

Please write your congressperson and ask to support this bipartisan legislation to bring the troops home. Congressman Kucinich has written that he is facing three ’reasons’ why we cannot leave when discussing this with other congressmen.

1. A feeling that setting a date for withdrawal would encourage insurgents to settle down, wait until the US leaves, and then once again escalate action.

2. A concern that we have lost so many troops already that it would dishonor the memory of those who gave their lives if the US were to withdraw.

3. A belief that we are winning the war and now is not the time to talk about leaving.

Of course these ’reasons’ are utterly insane to those of us that have been paying attention, however most people in congress are pretty busy, living in their own world, and only watching corporate news. ( Isn’t it wild that they sign away our constitution, troops are dying because they have done very little to actually support the troops in the field, 100,000 Iraqis are dead because of their denial and apathy and yet they have no remorse while the rest of us feel horribly guilty about this mess) Because of this we must realize where these people are, and perhaps explain to them kindly, but firmly...
The same people that lied to get us in Iraq, are still lying now! All evidence points to the fact that we are losing in Iraq, but the Bush Administration says we are winning...who are you going to believe? This mess is only going to get worse, not better and if you continue to support it your career will go down with the Bush Administration or something like that.

Please call or write your Representative and make your voice heard.

senate contact info

and now for some good news...
US House passes ammendment to Fund Research on Gulf War Illnesses