Fwd: Two Stories Tell the Tale...W.R. Pitt

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Two Stories Tell the Tale...W.R. Pitt

 

 

 

Two Stories Tell the Tale

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

 

Thursday 06 July 2006

 

Iraq is a part of the war on terror. Iraq is a central front on that

war.

- George W. Bush, statement from Baghdad, 6/13/06

 

Two different stories boiled over in the last few days, each of which

tells us too many sorry things about where we are as a nation. North Korea

flopped several missiles into the Sea of Japan, including one that could

reportedly reach the West Coast of the United States, and a discharged

American soldier has been accused of raping an Iraqi teenager and shooting

her and three members of her family.

 

The missiles in North Korea are of fundamental importance to both

American national security, and the security of the Pacific region. In an

irony of global proportions, the rogue government of North Korea declared to

the United States and the world that it possessed nuclear weapons on April

24, 2003. This was, of course, a little more than a month after the Bush

administration initiated the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

 

Three years later, we are still mired in the bloodbath of Iraq, having

found no weapons of mass destruction and having failed to establish anything

even remotely resembling a democracy. A nation that was no threat to US

security was smashed to flinders, and has since bloomed into a real and

growing national security threat.

 

The influential journal Foreign Affairs recently polled 100 leading

foreign policy experts on the efficacy of the so-called " War on Terror, " and

86 of them declared the thing to be a comprehensive failure. We are far less

safe now, they reported, thanks largely to what we have done in Iraq. " When

you strip away the politics, the experts, almost to a person, are very

worried about the administration, " said Joe Cirincione, vice-president of

the Center for American Progress. " They think none of our front-line

institutions is doing a good job and that Iraq has made the terror situation

much worse. "

 

That threat was outlined in a recent diplomatic cable from the US

embassy in Baghdad that describes the daily situation on the streets of

Iraq. According to the cable, neighborhoods are dominated by self-appointed

" governments " who barricade streets to keep outsiders away. Ethnic cleansing

is taking place on a daily basis in every province. Gas lines last all day,

and electricity is unavailable for hours at a time. Iraqi civilians working

for the embassy must hide their employment or face abduction and death. The

notion that the Iraqi central government exercises any control whatsoever is

dismissed as laughable.

 

Yet here is North Korea flinging missiles into the ether after having

openly admitted to possessing nuclear weapons. The fact that these missiles

failed is no salve, for that failure will be used by their engineers to

diagnose and fix the problems that brought the missiles down. The Bush

administration expended blood and treasure to crush a country that had no

ability to harm us, and sat idly by while a genuine threat sharpened its

claws. Worse, this administration even now touts Iraq as the " central front "

of their failed terror war.

 

This is not to say that the administration should have attempted an

invasion and occupation of North Korea instead of Iraq. China, Russia, Japan

and Pacific Rim geopolitics in general make such an invasion somewhat

sticky. More important, of course, are North Korea's conventional warfare

capabilities. Any kind of invasion or attack would have been riddled with

danger and the potential for broadening complications.

 

Maybe, just maybe, a decision to avoid the invasion and occupation of

Iraq would not have weakened American prestige on the international stage.

Maybe the Bush administration's decision to give the international community

the back of its hands would have helped us negotiate with the teeth-grinders

running North Korea. Maybe our ability to telegraph a threat, something

central to any negotiating stance and specifically important when dealing

with a rogue state, would be far superior today had we not denuded our armed

forces and treasury by getting bogged down in a useless Iraqi excursion.

 

The story surrounding the rape and slaughter of the Iraqi teenager and

her family is, perhaps, even more damaging and dangerous than the North

Korean situation. According to reports, Steven D. Green and several other

soldiers got boozed up before breaking into the home of a family in

Mahmudiayh, some 20 miles outside Baghdad. They shot three family members to

death with an AK-47, raped the young woman, and then killed her as well.

Their blood-spattered clothes were later burned to dispose of evidence.

 

News reports of the incident describe Green has having a " personality

disorder, " which may have motivated his actions, but nothing is said of the

other soldiers involved having similar disorders. They picked this young

Iraqi woman out, raped her, and butchered her and her family. This is one of

five incidents currently under investigation involving American soldiers

killing Iraqi civilians, the most notorious being the massacre in Haditha of

24 Iraqis.

 

The soldiers we have deployed over there are beginning to snap. They are

trapped in an environment with no clear enemy to fight, but where their

comrades are killed every day. Their mission has nothing to do with

democracy or weapons of mass destruction, and they know it. All too often,

they are killed on patrols between northern Iraq and Baghdad while guarding

the convoys that run to and from the petroleum facilities. They go home and

are sent back, and go home and are sent back.

 

The strain is on every soldier over there, and some of them are going

insane from the pressure. Those who do not explode in a frenzy of

indiscriminate violence suffer nonetheless, and must now endure the moral

stain brought upon them by those fellow soldiers for whom the pressure is

too much. Many vow to get out of the service once their time is up.

Experienced non-commissioned officers - the backbone of any effective

military - are walking away in record numbers. The threat posed to the basic

fabric of our armed forces by Iraq is manifest and growing.

 

Delineating gradations of " horrifying " becomes a subjective task after a

time, because after a certain level of disgust is reached and then

surpassed, everything melds into indiscriminate shades of darkness. We

invaded Iraq under false premises, killed tens and tens of thousands of

innocent civilians, lost more than two thousand soldiers in the effort,

ravaged the infrastructure, destroyed the economy, stole the oil, shattered

any semblance of social order, unleashed a slow-burning civil war, and have

attempted to paint the whole thing over with a veneer of democracy.

 

Our ability to deal with international threats has suffered, and our

soldiers in Iraq are showing undeniable signs of cracking. We have been

whistling past the graveyard in North Korea, and making a graveyard out of

Iraq, and the world is a far more dangerous place today because of it.

 

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling

author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know

and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.