GREAT IS OUR GUILT OVER THIS UNNECESSARY WAR

"Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war."

John Adams

By Juan Montoya

I had thought we had gotten over it after the Vietnam War.
I thought it couldn't come to pass again that an enlightened citizenry hoodwinked by the hyper-patriotic utterings of demagogues who wrapped the flag around themselves would allow their young men and women to be led off to an unnecessary war.

But there we were 10 years ago following the leadership of a National Air Guard dropout all gung-ho to go destroy the evil empire of the man who was made to be somehow responsible for blowing up the Twin Towers on 911.

But now, more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead later, $1.7 trillion in wasted treasure, and an another estimated $6 trillion to take care of our wounded and maimed over the next 20 years, what have we to show for this folly under the patriots of the George W. Bush Administration who beat on the drums of war? This was the call. Remember?

"The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.

...Terrorists and terror states do not reveal these threats with fair notice, in formal declarations—and responding to such enemies only after they have struck first is not self-defense, it is suicide. The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now."

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

As the world soon realized, and the media caught on, "this, obviously, was all a fever dream. There were no biological or nuclear weapons; there may have been a few rusty chemical shells lying around, just as there had been for decades. Iraq was not an important sponsor of Islamicist terrorism. Islamicist terrorism was fueled not by fascist dictatorships such as Iraq, but by non-state actors in failed states such as Afghanistan and Somalia; and our invasion of Iraq promptly turned it into precisely the sort of failed-state sectarian war zone that does fuel terrorism.

Thousands of American soldiers died in a war in Iraq that only exacerbated the danger of anti-American terrorism. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers died as well, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in the resulting civil war, most killed by the Iraqi militias who emerged in the power vacuum the U.S. invasion created, but many killed by U.S. armed forces themselves. In the name of pre-empting a non-existent threat, America killed tens of thousands (134,000 at last count) of people and turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorism. And we spent a trillion dollars ($1.7 trillion) to do it."

And those few voices that were brave enough to cry out against the mad dash to war were soon silenced with the disapproval of the patriotic-mad lust of war, the right-wing talk show hosts, and the think tanks that were set up by corporations to incite the expenditure of the nation's treasure...and blood. The Patriot Act was crafted to intrude into the most minuscule reaches of our civil liberties under the guise of ferreting out evil tendencies among the people. Your calls can now be monitored. Your mail can be opened. The government can pry into your reading habits at the public library.

Some of the soldier dead names are inscribed on the plaques of the Veterans' Park Memorial on Central Boulevard in Brownsville. Some whose families could not afford it are not. We cannot say they died in vain because no life is lived in vain. Rather, it is wasted when demagogues rule our national conscience and we allow them to frighten us into jumping off the cliff after them. We thought we had learned that lesson in previous wars. We've got a way to go.