Absolutely Nuts

[dddaver]

I'll try to keep to the facts, I'm VERY upset.

I just watched CBS news. When Scott Pelly was in Afghanistan he interviewed a soldier and showed the interview just now. Pelly led off before showing the interview saying, "You're about to see the face of PTSD." The soldier had been to Afganistan before, was on his second tour there. He had been in a firefight and got hit in the left shoulder. His lieutenant tried to reach him. The lieutenant was shot. The soldier lobbed two grenades into the machine gun nest. Then he carried the lieutenant a mile where they medivaced the lieutenant out. The lieutenant died. The soldier has had bad dreams, screams in his sleep and sees the lieutenants face. He was getting better, until a week before he was scheduled to go back. Then it started again. Pelly asked him why he came back. The guy said maybe confronting this will rid him of his demons. I lost it and shut the TV off.

I served 20 in the USAF. I was in Saudi for the first Gulf War and went into Kosovo. I did my time, I'm not totally removed or just some sideline wimp Monday morning quarterback. This is tragic. This guy is a true, bonafide, American hero and deserves only the best, but no, his ass gets sent back into some crazy ass shoot-em up just so some rich ass motherfucker can get richer. He deserves to be prescribed all the MMJ he wants for his PTSD like they do in Israel. The US government and the Army are SO fucked up.

My tears have stopped finally, thanks for reading.

 

[Jenn]

Ya I feel for you guys, I just mentioned in a thread earlier today that my grandfather was a prisoner of war for a year and a half in Germany and my dad was in Vietnam. My dad still has nightmares about it....

Thanks for serving - Jenn

 

[flubnutz]

peace be with you, brother.

 

[Warped1]

Sadly that sums it up pretty well

 

[greenmatter]

i did my time in a uniform too, but it is nothing compared to what these guys are going through. these guys should do one tour and get to come home AND STAY HOME. if the clowns in washington get us into shit that can't be solved within the time they have then the politicians should have to start a draft and try to explain to all of us why we gotta send our kids to do their bidding.( THAT IS NOT A PRO WAR OR PRO DRAFT STATEMENT) it is a lighting a fire under our leaders asses statement! it is only when the politicians start taking fire that shit gets changed, and these fucks get a free ride in the press while good men and woman put their lives on the line. these people deserve better

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Thanks and respect to all former and current service members.

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

^I read that more soldiers have committed suicide in the past two wars than have been killed by enemies. That speaks for the horrors of war pretty well. These front line soldiers should be guaranteed a good life when they get back, no questions asked. No one has earned it more. Weather if you agree or disagree with war, people should have compassion for our soldiers.

 

[supermanlives]

the next war we have we shouyld send all the clowns in washington as an advance force. let them die first. bet we wouldnt have many wars if they went first

 

[trichrider]

the next war?
some optimism in your statement...that these f*cks will be around still!
the next war should be a rebellion against these fascist faces. pennsylvania ave. should be the front line.

i read that too about the casualities being outnumbered by the resultant suicides of vets.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

As Obama Announces Iraq Troop Withdrawal, Critics Say War Provides 'Cautionary Tale'

As Obama Announces Iraq Troop Withdrawal, Critics Say War Provides 'Cautionary Tale'

Dan Froomkin - First Posted: 10/21/11 07:35 PM ET Updated: 10/21/11 07:51 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- As President Barack Obama announced an imminent end to the American war in Iraq on Friday, long-time critics looked back on a nearly nine-year military campaign that provided lesson after lesson about what not to do ever again.

Critics say that the combination of an invasion launched on false pretenses, followed by a postwar plan based on false assumptions, resulted in a long, bitter and costly war that, with the one notable exception of eliminating Saddam Hussein, accomplished pretty much the opposite of what it set out to achieve.

"This should be, to my mind, a cautionary tale on the level with Vietnam," said Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the progressive National Security Network.

"I think it was probably the largest strategic error we ever made," said Brian Katulis, a national security expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "And it was self-inflicted. And the blunder was shared by Democrats and Republicans alike -- people sometimes forget that."

Possibly the single biggest lesson for the American public is "how relatively easily they were stampeded into a very unwise and illegal war," said Juan Cole, a Mideast expert and blogger at the University of Michigan.

And it was a war that came at an enormous cost in blood and treasure. More than $1 trillion has been spent, more than 4,400 American military lives have been lost, many more troops have been horribly wounded, and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.

"This was not just bad decision-making, this was bad decision-making that cost the lives of over 4,000 service members," Richard Allen Smith, vice chairman of the progressive VoteVets.org group, told HuffPost. "For those of us who served, it's not just 4,000 random dudes, it's 4,000 people that we knew, who were somebody's father or son, or mother or daughter."

Cole said he believes that all the things that went wrong after the invasion stemmed from the original, misbegotten decision to go to war in the first place -- despite the fact, he added, that Iraq hadn't attacked the U.S., wasn't behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and posed no immediate threat to the international order. The ensuing chaos, civil war and rise of al-Qaida "were all kind of fruit of the poisonous tree," he said.

And despite the hopes of inexperienced 20-something Bush loyalists who thought they could build a Jeffersonian democracy there, the U.S. leaves behind "a very fragile and wounded society," Cole said.

"My basic take on Iraq is what we're seeing is in many ways more of the same. The basic underlying conflicts, based especially on sectarian and religious divides, have not been resolved," said Paul R. Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who now teaches at Georgetown University.

Due to widespread ethnic cleansing, Shiite and Sunni Muslims rarely live near each other anymore, but they are still in an ongoing battle for power. Meanwhile, the Kurds have established a nearly independent state of their own -- even while provoking cross-border attacks from Turkey.

"I think the status quo is an ongoing disaster," Cole said. "You still have high rates of bombings and political violence." And further ethnic cleansing or war between rival militias could be just one shrine bombing away, he said.

"To some degree the Iraqis were given an opportunity with the fall of Saddam," Cole said, adding that the U.S. military occupation then made political progress nearly impossible. "To have normal politics at a time when you have Marines on patrol in major cities, that was difficult," he said.

"The message to the American people is there are a lot of problems in Iraq that we never should have presumed to solve ourselves," Pillar said. "The war has been one of the biggest manifestations of American hubris in terms of believing mistakenly that we could remake another society forcefully."

Neoconservatives championed the war in part because they believed that the projection of American power is essential for national security -- and good for the world.
But instead, the war left America weaker, both materially and in the eyes of the world, critics say.

"We should be glad that this phase is coming to an end, but we should be aware that we're still living with the consequences in real and unpleasant ways," Hurlburt said. Among those consequences: "Iran empowered; Muslim world suspicions of us heightened; a terrorism problem where there wasn't a problem before; enormous pressures put on our military; lives lost, American and Iraqi."

"We certainly eliminated Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, but I think on balance, if you're looking at this from a U.S. national security perspective, it's still a net negative," Katulis said. "The net negatives are not only the cost, the lives lost, the expansion of Iranian influence westward, the chaos that is still in the Iraqi society," he said. There's also "the broader damage to our reputation throughout the world," he added.

Part of that damage likely stems from the original decision to go to war. As Pillar put it: "This war played directly into the extremist narrative according to which the United States is out to kill Muslims, occupy their land and plunder their resources."

But even more damage has come from the inability to achieve the stated goals in Iraq, Katulis said. "And as a consequence we look weaker," he said. "I have to laugh when I hear conservatives say Obama has made America look weak around the world."

"Nobody doubts that we have awesome military power, but it's a blunt instrument, and that's where I think the misunderstanding was," Hurlburt said. True power involves the "sophisticated application of no more force than necessary," she said.

Hurlburt drew a contrast between Iraq and the nearby country in the news this week: "We applied so little force in Libya, and that looks like a demonstration of our power," she said, "while we applied so much force in Iraq, and that looks like a demonstration of our weakness."

And as far as the region goes, the war may have only exacerbated a problem the U.S. may need to face in the future. "Amidst all we're hearing today about Iran, the Iraq war was the single biggest gift to the Islamic Republic of Iran, in terms of extending its influence in the Persian Gulf," Pillar said.

Saddam's Iraq was Iran's chief rival; and key elements within the current Iraqi government are now more sympathetic to Iran than they are to the United States.

When neoconservatives bemoan the fact that the U.S. troop departure could embolden Iran, Pillar said, they should be reminded that "our presence in Iraq has expanded and extended Iran's influence, rather than the contrary."

Of the many lessons of the Iraq war, Pillar has determined that the single most important one is not to launch a war without the appropriate deliberative process.

"I think historians 50 or 100 years from now will find this one of the most extraordinary aspects of the whole thing: that the previous administration launched the war with no process for deliberating about whether this was a good idea," he said.

Indeed, despite Bush's insistence in his autobiography that he agonized over his decision to invade Iraq, there is now an abundant amount of documentation -- in the form of leaks, unclassified memos, witness interviews and other people's memoirs -- to prove that he and Vice President Cheney were dead-set on war long before they sent in the troops.

It's also hard to make the case that the pretenses under which the war was declared were the result of innocent mistakes. The Center for Public Integrity, for instance, compiled a database documenting 935 false statements by Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials in what it called a "carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

Despite everything, Smith, vice chairman of the VoteVets.org group, is adamant about one thing: "Even with a situation like Iraq where a war is fought for all the wrong reasons, no soldier or marine died in vain," he said.

"Everyone that served in that conflict served for a valiant purpose, ensuring the well-being of those to their left and their right," he said. "They didn't die in vain, because they died fighting to protect their comrades."

Cole, meanwhile, said he has no doubt about what would have happened in Iraq if Bush hadn't invaded: "I think Iraq would have been Libya," he said. "When the Arab Spring came along, if Saddam had still been there, it's almost certain that the Shiites and the Kurds would have risen up against him in the past eight months." And the U.S. -- presumably still maintaining a no-fly zone over the country -- would have stopped Saddam's tanks and helicopter gunships, guaranteeing his demise, Cole added.

The endstate would be far superior to what it is today, Cole said.

"The revolution would have been made by the Iraqi people, there would be no foreign troops on the ground, and it would be much more likely that they could come to a compromise with each other," he said.

"You would not have had the emergence of al-Qaida," he said. And Saddam's army might have quickly been reassembled, rather than being disastrously disbanded, as it was by the Bush administration a few months after the invasion. "You wouldn't have had all that turmoil and looting that flowed from the disbanding of the Army," he said.

"In Libya, order didn't completely break down like it did under the impact of the American invasion," Cole said. "Iraq would have been much better off with a Libya-style uprising."

 

[flubnutz]

somebody with the benefit of experience said to me, "watch the number of homeless as vets come home". its hard to say during these tough times, but it is something to watch.

war makes you see things, and do things, that you never wanted to see or do. things that are hard to talk about to others who have no real idea what it's like. and thank g-d for the humanity that makes people feel that way. its the ones that don't feel that way that worry me. in the greater scheme of things, it may be necessary, but, what a price to pay.

i think everyone in congress, and even the exec, that vote for war, should have to spend one week in-country, on patrol, like the embedded journalists, maybe with an journalist. the only exemption should be if you've worn a combat infantryman's badge, CMB, CAB, EIB, EFMB, CAR, or AFCAM. you should know what it's like when someone's trying to kill you, or lord help you and them, see what its like when people are wounded or killed. even then, they probably won't know what it's like when it happened to your bud.

 

[zenoonez]

Is it sad? Hell yes it is sad. You know what is worse? They guys who make it through a tour and then come back, realize there is no support system to help them integrate into life again and blow their brains out. You know what is more sad than either of those things? I know of a soldier who reenlisted who is now faking ptsd to get out. Makes me sick.

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

^I read that more soldiers have committed suicide in the past two wars than have been killed by enemies. That speaks for the horrors of war pretty well. These front line soldiers should be guaranteed a good life when they get back, no questions asked. No one has earned it more. Weather if you agree or disagree with war, people should have compassion for our soldiers.

really? somebody found this post to be negative..... ok then.

 

[longearedfriend]

I also think that all people in people should go do some time in some fed prisons

I think it was in farenheit 9/11, moore explains that only one persone in the senate had a child serve in the army

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

And the top ten richest lawmakers all voted for the tax cut extension.

 

[megayields]

For everyone who has served....thank you and may your god of choice grant you peace.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Watch out mega, I got negative repped for the same comment, lol. I guess some of these protesters can't grasp that the military by and large is following orders. Very few make the decisions that come back to haunt us.

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

can they grasp that these guys believed they were fighting for freedom, and whether they were or they were not not, in the long run it doesn't matter, because they were told they did by our democracy, including democrats. They put their lives on the line because they believed and probably were protecting Americans. Don't hate the soldier, hate the politician. It is the U.S. public school system that breeds the pro America no matter what crap into every kid from day one in preschool anyways. we say the pledge before every 1st period like it is a prayer.

You guys would think the "Liberty and Justice for all" thing were true but it ain't.

 

[flubnutz]

the warriors never want to give up. in a democracy, the rest of have to say, "enough". saddam, a murderer, who was also iran's greatest enemy, who fought an 8 year war against them, with u.s. help, is dead; because of the u.s. the new iraqi government, made possible by the u.s., doesn't want the u.s. there, unless u.s. soldiers can be prosecuted locally. the withdrawl was agreed on with the iraqis, by bush, who took the u.s. to war, over iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which didn't exist. osama is killed next door to pakistan's version of west point. karzai says he'd join pakistan in a war against the u.s. it's enough to make you cry.

 

[Hash Zeppelin]

^ It is all very confusing. It would make sense to pull out of the entire middle east for U.S. interest in peace, but the region would go to hell, and Israel would be massacred. They certainly would fight to the death.