The hell visited on the Iraqi people is also visited on Americans. According to "Suicide's Rising Toll" (NYT, Aug. 1), suicide levels for troops are at the highest level ever recorded. Another article, "For Veterans, A Weekend Pass from Homelessness" (NYT, July 25), notes that of the approximately 200,000 homeless veterans, 3,700 are veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan.
In "Generation Kill," Evan Wright describes an incident where U.S. soldiers fire on a civilian car and check the passengers: "(Pvt.) Graves sees a small girl of about three curled up in the backseat. ... Graves reaches in to pick her up - thinking about what medical supplies he might need to treat her, he later says - then the top of her head slides off and her brains fall out. When Graves steps back, he nearly falls over when his boot slips in the girl's brains."
One out of three returning soldiers reporting to Veterans Affairs hospitals is being diagnosed with mental illness, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. And, as reported in Bob Herbert's "The Great Shame," female troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan faced 25 percent more sexual assaults in 2008 compared to 2007.
There are hundreds of bright young ROTC students who come to campus sharing an understandable and admirable dedication to getting a respectable, stable job that serves their country. A few weeks later, they march through campus shouting: "Psycho, PSYCHO! Maniac, MANIAC!" The reasons for this chant are obvious, but it is considered unpatriotic to point this out.
If defending one's country is brave and honorable, we must write odes to the brave and honorable Iraqi resistance, whose country actually was invaded.
The same leaders who say we should "Support the Troops" do exactly the opposite. They argue that pointing out the horrific consequences is somehow disrespectful. Or, criticism is invalid because of some irremediable flaw in the newspaper, writer and so forth. The doctrine is the same: Condemn violence from our official enemies and do not question violence we carry out.
The Iraq War is an obscenity as measured by virtually any statistic that matters to human beings. For knowledgeable people who cringe at the horror of Sept. 11, while continuing to justify the invasion of Iraq, which is a far worse atrocity, there is one simple assumption: Iraqis are not human beings.
At least we should stop lying about the Iraq War. We should say that our leaders are mass murderers, we are all guilty of subsidizing war crimes, and we do not care.
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Ignorance, thy name is Burke Thomas.
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Geez Alum, great point! That's sarcasm, by the way. I'll make a real point: please, for the love of God, can someone inform the citizens of the US that we are a REPUBLIC and not a democracy. We can't spread what we are not.
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Sorry. Didn't mean to insult ignorance.
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no mention of the Afghan war? I can take a guess why it wasn't mentioned. And I would say we are not being terrorists in Iraq because we aren't pursuing to achieve any goals. But perhaps next time a country will not kick out weapons inspectors or we might have to do this all over again
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Burke, great article. Sad, how anyone can defend the Iraq or Afghan wars as honorable or for "spreading democracy". Is it any wonder why people hate America? We go around the world invading innocent countries under the guise of helping them to look for weapons we sold them. Is Iran a threat? No. If they want to build nuclear weapons, go for it. They have a right to defend themselves from America or Israel, what they do is none of our business. Besides, they aren't building weapons but power plants to offset the large price swings in oil. We don't like the fact that they stopped using dollars to trade their oil, b/c it hurts our reserve currency status and reveals our inflation tactics. Unfortunately for us (or fortunately for the rest of the world) all empires fall apart, especially ones propped up by paper money.
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Part 1: Thomas, I applaud your ability to stretch and distort the truth. The world isn’t as black and white as you portray it; you can’t just simply quote manuals and definitions and conclude the most extreme interpretations as doctrine. If you want to simplify war then here is a better cliché “war is hell and the innocent dieâ€Â. Innocents die because armed and violent militants hide behind them. That is why our soldiers are viewed as honorable because they strive, no matter how imperfect they are, to live by a code of honor; they fight in the open while trying to distinguish friend from foe. The drastic difference between Americans and terrorists is that on the whole America fights for freedom for all, terrorists fight for world domination of their ideas. You may be correct in saying that the 9/11 hijackers were trying to create a utopia in the Arab world, but you fail to mention that they wanted the entire world to be an Arab world ruled by their ideas and view of utopia. Thomas also lies to his audience in saying that these resistant fighters, terrorists, fight for their own country which is not true. Terrorists have no country, they are soldiers of NO country, and they aren’t even militias of any country. They are criminals, outlaws, and murders; there is no sugar coating the world ‘terrorist’.
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Part 2: Terrorists seek to kill the innocent because they are defenseless; a soldier seeks to kill these men to protect the defenseless. As I said in the beginning, it is not this clear cut but this is a closer account of the generalized truth then what Thomas has portrayed. It is people like you, Thomas, who bring dishonor to your country when you try to romanticize terrorists.
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Part 3: To Alumnus, Iran has consistently declared how they plan on erasing Israel and America from existence - it is usually with a lot of flair and a nuclear explosion.
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Ford - "The drastic difference between Americans and terrorists is that on the whole America fights for freedom for all, terrorists fight for world domination of their ideas." So i guess invading countries to install a democratic government is not enforcing its ideas on the world. To the writer, obviously war has its faults. But to say that killing civilians during a war is a terrorist act is inconceivable. I urge you to go back and find a war that was fought without a single civilian casualty when fought with live ammunition or missiles. The people we are fighting may be Iraqi's, Pakistanis, etc., but they are also people who have severe hatred for Americans and as a country we don't stand for that. Do I agree with this war, no, but I also look at it from two sides. On one, you don't let someone come onto your turf and kill thousands of people. On the other, at which point do you admit that you bit off more than you can chew.
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Ford, The leader of Iran has never said it wants to wipe Israel off the map, those quotes were taken out of context. Iran is not a threat, their president doesn't even have final say on such matters even if he wanted to do such things. Obama does and Bush did, which country has more of a democracy? Not us, that's for sure. To which code were American soldiers abiding by when they torture prisoners or dress them up and take pictures with them to embarrass them? I missed that part of the honor code. Where is it in the code where we can bomb and murder innoncent civilians just because it's part of war. The war is pointless, it is not justified. Why can we have nuclear weapons and Iran not have them? Iran should have nukes so they can prevent what happened to Iraq and Afghanistan and the threat that Israel poses to them as well. We gave Pakistan nukes, India has nukes, why aren't we up in arms over that. We gave Israel nukes, they are a religious nation, should we bomb them b/c they threaten to use them? That sounds like terrorism when we threaten to invade an innocent country just b/c Israel doesn't like them.
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Alumnus, you're delusional. You really think Iran is more democratic than the United States? Really? And as for your puerile comments about American soldiers, get a clue. The soldiers who "torture[d] prisoners or dress[ed] them up and [took] pictures with them to embarrass them" didn't follow our code. And they went to jail for it. It also isn't part of the American way of war to "bomb and murder innoncent civilians just because it's part of war." We never target civilians. Our enemies target them almost exclusively. Or was the World Trade Center full of soldiers and I missed it?
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Alumnus, from your probable Bible, the New York Times, 27 OCT 05: "TEHRAN  Iran's conservative new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Wednesdaythat Israel must be "wiped off the map" and that attacks by Palestinians would destroy it, the ISNA press agency reported. Ahmadinejad was speaking to an audience of about 4,000 students at a program called "The World Without Zionism," in preparation for an annual anti-Israel demonstration on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan."
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which army field manual defines terrorism that way? there are plenty of FMs out there. writing "US Army Field Manual" makes it seem like there is only one. so get to know some FMs.
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Excellent article. Very well done.
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Sounds like we could use more good people like Burke in our military to uphold our values of not hurting innocent civilians. He could actually institute change from within and really make a difference.
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He writes as if we step off the plane and line civilians up for executions. We are fighting an army not a people. Of course 99% of people think that killing innocents is wrong. Good thing we aren't there to do that. Innocents die in war, that's what happens. If you are trying to tell me that killing innocents is bad, well then you have nothing to say that everybody doesn't already know.
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