How Many Deaths Will It Take?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/10/opinion/10herbert.html?th

 

September 10, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

 

How Many Deaths Will It Take?

By BOB HERBERT

 

It was Vietnam all over again - the heartbreaking head

shots captioned with good old American names:

 

Jose Casanova, Donald J. Cline Jr., Sheldon R. Hawk

Eagle, Alyssa R. Peterson.

 

Eventually there'll be a fine memorial to honor the

young Americans whose lives were sacrificed for no

good reason in Iraq. Yesterday, under the headline

" The Roster of the Dead, " The New York Times ran

photos of the first thousand or so who were killed.

 

They were sent off by a president who ran and hid when

he was a young man and his country was at war. They

fought bravely and died honorably. But as in Vietnam,

no amount of valor or heroism can conceal the fact

that they were sent off under false pretenses to fight

a war that is unwinnable.

 

How many thousands more will have to die before we

acknowledge that President Bush's obsession with Iraq

and Saddam Hussein has been a catastrophe for the

United States?

 

Joshua T. Byers, Matthew G. Milczark, Harvey E.

Parkerson 3rd, Ivory L. Phipps.

 

Fewer and fewer Americans believe the war in Iraq is

worth the human treasure we are losing and the

staggering amounts of money it is costing. But no one

can find a way out of this tragic mess, which is why

that dreaded word from the Vietnam era - quagmire -

has been resurrected. Most Washington insiders agree

with Senator John McCain, who said he believes the

U.S. will be involved militarily in Iraq for 10 or 20

more years.

 

To what end? You can wave goodbye to the naïve idea

that democracy would take root in Iraq and then spread

like the flowers of spring throughout the Middle East.

That was never going to happen. So what are we there

for, other than to establish a permanent military

stronghold in the region and control the flow of Iraqi

oil?

 

The insurgency in Iraq will never end as long as the

U.S. is occupying the country. And our Iraqi " allies "

will never fight their Iraqi brethren with the kind of

intensity the U.S. would like, any more than the South

Vietnamese would fight their fellow Vietnamese with

the fury and effectiveness demanded by the hawks in

the Johnson administration.

 

The Iraqi insurgents - whether one agrees with them or

not - believe they are fighting for their homeland,

their religion and their families. The Americans are

not at all clear what they're fighting for. Saddam is

gone. There were no weapons of mass destruction. The

link between Saddam and the atrocities of Sept. 11 was

always specious and has been proven so.

 

At some point, as in Vietnam, the American public will

balk at the continued carnage, and this tragic

misadventure will become politically unsustainable.

Meanwhile, the death toll mounts.

 

Elia P. Fontecchio, Raheen Tyson Heighter, Sharon T.

Swartworth, Ruben Valdez Jr.

 

One of the reasons the American effort in Iraq is

unsustainable is that the American people know very

little about the Iraqi people and their culture, and

in most cases couldn't care less. The war in Iraq was

sold as a response to Sept. 11. As it slowly dawns on

a majority of Americans that the link was bogus, and

that there is no benefit to the U.S. from this war,

only endless grief, the political support will all but

vanish.

 

(This could take awhile. In a poll done for Newsweek

magazine this week, 42 percent of the respondents

continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was directly

involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.)

 

We've put our troops in Iraq in an impossible

situation. If you are not permitted to win a war,

eventually you will lose it. In Vietnam, for a variety

of reasons, the U.S. never waged total war, although

the enemy did. After several years and more than

58,000 deaths, we quit.

 

We won't - and shouldn't - wage total war in Iraq,

either. But to the insurgents, the Americans epitomize

evil. We're the crazed foreigners who invaded their

country and killed innocent Iraqi civilians, including

women and children, by the thousands. We call that

collateral damage. They call it murder. For them, this

is total war.

 

President Bush never prepared the nation for the

prolonged violence of this war. He still hasn't spoken

candidly about it. If he has an idea for hauling us

out of this quagmire, he hasn't bothered to reveal it.

 

The troops who are fighting and dying deserve better.

 

E-mail: bobherb

 

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