How Best to Honor Our Military Heroes? By Calling to Account The Civilian Leaders Who Sent Them to Fight Unneeded Wars

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPolitics.einnews.com

May 27, 2009

During the explosion of anger that accompanied news of the AIG bonuses back in March, veteran Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa said during a radio interview, “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them [AIG's executives] would be if they'd follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things — resign, or go commit suicide.”

I thought of Grassley's advice Sunday night watching the annual Memorial Day ceremony at the U.S. Capitol and on Monday during the day's Memorial Day tributes. But I wasn't thinking about the AIG executives. I was thinking about the civilian leadership that sent our people in uniform off to a needless, senseless war in Iraq. And, for good measure, I'd add those who entangled the U.S. in the Vietnam War and kept us there for so many years.

From private to general, we train those in our armed forces to respect civilian authority. They ship out to wherever civilian leadership tells them they are needed to protect the U.S. and our way of life. Most military people I've met are real democrats with a lower case “d.” When we order them to defend the country, they know what they're fighting for. They seldom question the decisions of civilian authority.

But for the past 50 years there has been a collapse of wisdom, and wisdom's cousin, common sense, at the level of governmental Olympus where decisions about war and peace are made.

The Bush-Cheney White House said we had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons and other biological and chemical threats to humanity. We couldn't wait until “the smoking gun turned out to be a mushroom cloud.” We had to invade because Saddam Hussein had linked arms with al Qaeda and was complicit in bringing down the trade towers. Iraq was “the front line” of the “War on Terror.”

All of this now, of course, is demonstrably, factually wrong. But have you heard any apologies from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice or anyone else who gave the marching orders at the time?

And even if they were to apologize, is it enough to just say, “oops”? After tens of thousands of those wearing U.S. uniforms have been killed, dismembered or sent back to wives, children and families to live out the rest of their lives packing physical and mental wreckage? Or after the nation has spent a trillion dollars paying for their mistakes? Or now that we are incurring enormous new risks and costs pursuing resurgent al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists who had been all but defeated back in 2001? Or now that Iran, no longer worrying about hostile Iraq on its borders, and facing the U.S. entangled in two wars, has drawn enormous new strength as a dangerous force in the Middle East?

Even if we were willing to chalk all of this up to just extraordinarily faulty policy decisions based on incredibly poor intelligence, what do we do about the documents and witnesses coming forward to tell us what so many Americans instinctively knew at the time---the decision to invade Iraq was based on outright deception? Or, as the British Downing Street memos so succinctly put it, the White House had decided “to fix the intelligence” to make the case for war. Do we just ignore all of this?

The record is replete with evidence of a Bush-Cheney White House determined to invade Iraq, provoking Saddam to provide a pretext for war, crushing dissent, and manipulating information to terrify the public, and to mislead the Congress and the world community.

Our Iraq experience is a Middle East version of the nightmare jungle experience we call the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, as in Iraq, U.S. political leaders decided to go to war first, and then built a fraudulent public case to justify their decision. The U.S. consciously baited a few small North Vietnamese gun boats to fire on a U.S. warship. And that action triggered a war where the U.S. ultimately lost hundreds of thousands of men and women who were killed, wounded, or otherwise had their lives destroyed----along with too many Vietnamese to count.

One lie got us involved in Vietnam. A fountain of lies, deceptions and cover ups kept us there. And no one was ever called to account for it. The dead were and are still dead. The victims who escaped alive still carry their scars.

On Memorial Day this year, as in years past, we were introduced to many of the newest military victims. We learned their names, met their families, heard of their horrendous losses of life and limb. Each year we set aside a day to honor them, and we do, with speeches, flowers and other forms of salute.

But we could honor them even more, and more meaningfully, by conducting a vigorous, bi-partisan inquiry into the decisions to go to war in Iraq and Vietnam, and by doing everything in our power to see that they and those now in cribs and playgrounds aren't asked to serve in future senseless wars.

The other day the former president of South Korea committed suicide, apparently as the result of a scandal involving a few million dollars in questionable contracts. Whether or not he was directly involved, the late President Roo was too ashamed to continue living. Tragic. But, as Senator Grassley noted, it is tradition in Japan and other parts of Asia for disgraced political and business leaders to ask for forgiveness and to either resign or move on to the next life.

Suicide is an extreme remedy. But in the absence of leaders who willingly come forward, admit their mistakes and ask for forgiveness, a serious investigation that nails their names to the door of the public court of shame doesn't seem too much of a price to exact if we truly honor the people who were sent off to die.

Joe Rothstein, editor of US Politics Today, is a former daily newspaper editor and long-time national political strategist based in Washington, D.C.

See all previous articles by Joe Rothstein here.