[Announce] Fr Andrew Greeley on the Iraq War

[Robert Waldrop]

http://www.agreeley.com/articles/030907.html

March 9, 2007
In the Chicago SunTimes' Daily Southtown
By Andrew Greeley

  I see by the papers that Senators Barack Obama 
and John McCain have been "dinged" by the 
"researchers" (mud collectors and mud throwers) 
because they have asserted that lives and money 
have been "wasted" in Iraq. How dare they say that 
the lives of "our troops" were wasted? Have they 
no respect for the feelings of the survivors of 
"our troops''? Must one maintain the illusion that 
these brave men and women died for something 
important, like American freedom or democracy or 
to prevent another World Trade Center attack?

  The truth is that they died because of loyalty 
to the armed services and to their duty. That 
ought to be enough. One ought not to pretend that 
the war was waged for any other reason than that 
the president, the vice president, the secretary 
of defense and their coterie of neoconservative 
intellectuals wanted a war and exaggerated 
intelligence data to justify it.
  The administration talks endlessly about loyalty 
to our troops and the duty of all Americans to 
support them. In fact, once they had the 
congressional resolution justifying the war, they 
showed precious little concern for the troops. 
They did not send enough troops to ensure 
immediate victory, nor did they train them for the 
kind of war they would have to fight. It was 
supposed to be over in a couple of weeks. You 
could win with substantial numbers of reserve and 
National Guard personnel, weekend soldiers who 
were yanked away from their families and jobs and 
sent off to war.

 They did not equip the troops with adequate body 
armor or adequate vehicle armor. They did not 
devise a way to protect the troops from roadside 
bombs. They played games with their paychecks. 
They deployed and redeployed and then redeployed 
again, like they were yo-yos without any concern 
for their personal and familial stress. They 
assigned them to duty in prisons like Abu Ghraib 
for which they were totally unqualified.

  And Donald Rumsfeld delivered himself of the 
brilliant military dictum, "stuff happens." And 
remarked that ''you don't fight the war you want 
to fight but the war you have to fight.''

  Then, when the troops died in substantial 
numbers, they forbade pictures of flag-draped 
coffins being unloaded by the score from transport 
planes. They boasted of great progress and then 
redeployed troops again beyond human endurance.

  As the casualties mounted, the president mouthed 
meaningless cliches like, "Iraq is hard." Hard on 
whom, one wonders? On himself or the vice 
president? On Secretary Rumsfeld or Secretary 
Condoleezza Rice or on the wives and children, the 
mothers and fathers, the sweethearts and the 
friends of those who died in a foolish war that 
has been bungled at every deeper step into the Big 
Muddy? Hard on the men and women whose lives will 
be forever blighted by unnecessary deaths? But 
those of us who wanted all along to remove them 
from harm's way are accused of not supporting the 
troopswhen the leaders who sent them into this 
military miasma clearly don't give a hoot about 
them, save as a political talking point.

  Now we have the revelations of how the returning 
troops are treated at Building 18 in the Walter 
Reed Hospital complex, the inadequate treatment at 
most VA hospitals around the country, and the 
cover-up of statistics about brain injuries and 
post-traumatic stress disorder. The returning 
troops, it would seem, were relegated to a status 
similar to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

  To those of you preparing to write your usual 
letters telling me I am a traitor for not caring 
about the troops, I reply that you betrayed them 
by your silence about the intolerable expenditure 
of American blood and money (some of which might 
have gone to VA hospitals) so that President Bush 
could play-act at the role of a wartime president. 
And he wasn't even the kind of wartime president 
who would tour the hospitals or appoint men to 
make sure the hospitals were decent places to come 
alive again.

  In an administration where spin, doublethink and 
lies have replaced the truth, why is anyone 
surprised about mistreatment of injured troops? 
Why do we still think that the buck stops in the 
Oval Office as it did in Harry Truman's day?