Saturday
22 November 2008
22 November 2008
| This War, This President, My Son, And The Corps |
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| Opinion - Global Warning | |||
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |||
| Sunday, 25 May 2008 09:00 | |||
Washington, DC, USA. The war rages on, this one, the last one, all the wars since before Alexander swept across the Mediterranean on his way to India and a tomb in Egypt; all the great, bloody battles that have passed since Agamemnon sent his ships to rescue Helen and Grant pushed the southern rebellion back into the ashes of Richmond and the sea. Bodies still lay scattered, dead and lifeless, on the beaches of Normandy, still witnesses of the furnaces of Hitler’s final solution at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Wounded Knee, Little Big Horn, Rwanda, Tibet, Nanking, and the Sudan, the war is ours and we are the war, linked in an eternal ghost dance.
I am chained to the Viet Nam War, a child of World War II, Pearl Harbor, and Korea. My father flew the hump into China while my older brother died in infancy in my mother’s arms in Sacramento. I stayed in school, avoiding the draft, eventually ending up 4-F from the lingering effects of polio, marching against Lyndon’s and Nixon’s war.
Some of my friends came back, damaged of mind and body. Some I never saw again after their going away party.
I am shackled to 9-11, a Boeing 757, and a gaping hole in the Pentagon, a hundred feet from where I stood and saw the fireball, heard the explosion, watched the black smoke and flame of burning oil curl over the roof, felt the building rumble like a golden state earthquake as the overpressure pressed against us, blowing out the down target windows, drawing the fire and fumes away from me, letting me live.
Several hundred of my co-workers and friends, already dead and dying, consumed in the explosive combustion of an airliner filled with jet fuel, crushed beneath the concrete rubble of Pentagon walls and ceilings, were unable to walk out of our offices with me.
Afghanistan, Iraq, the President sent our troops, unable to make the decisions necessary to end this quickly, fighting a war designed to provide bright video game photo-ops and flashy high tech demonstrations rather than victory. Our opponents were not amused or willing to subject to Texas rhetoric and adolescent bluster and posturing. This was a war ill designed by the White House and executed poorly by the neo-cons the president left in charge and the Secretary of Defense he let direct the boots on the ground.
I have friends and coworkers in Afghanistan and Iraq. My son returns to the sandbox and the killing zone sometime later this year as I watch from my cubicle inside the Pentagon.
I have a president who has placed our country in a dark hole with few viable alternatives; a president who doesn’t seem to understand what he has done; a president, who like Lyndon Johnson before him, stakes his personal reputation on victory; a stubborn, self-consumed president unable to accept new information that challenges what he already knows must be true; a president unable and unwilling to change his mind. I have a president deep in stack overflow without the personal resources to hit the esc button or reboot himself, a president who sends the army, sends the marines and my son, into harm’s way without a plan for the end game.
If we withdraw unilaterally, Al-Qaeda will claim victory, Iran will seize large portions of what once was Iraq which will crumble into history, a footnote to ill conceived doctrine and plans, a milestone marking the beginning of America’s withdrawal from the world to gaze full time at its iPODS and televised realities. Here, at Baghdad, America will have shirked its responsibilities for a war it began and started its long slide into oblivion, an object lesson in national hubris and self-absorption.
A mess of historic proportions — George W. Bush’s mess, our mess by electing him not once, but twice — that will go on for years and decades as Iran takes the oil fields, the Saudi, supported by Syrian forces defend the Sunnis in the Sunni Triangle, and the Turks and the Kurds make war in the north. Al-Qaeda will have a safe haven to rival that in Afghanistan under the Taliban, that grows anew in the Afghani mountains along the border with Pakistan. At this point in our history, our unilateral withdrawal from the Iraqi front would seed the growth of global terrorism.
I cannot send my son to war: I cannot, in good conscience, say he should not serve our country, that we should think first of saving our own flesh and, only secondarily, the life of our Republic. If he does not go, who will?
Should we send only Catholics? Hindus? Jains? Perhaps some Buddhists or Baptists or Jews will volunteer? Why not ask a Muslim? Why not an agnostic or an atheist?
Yet my son goes, more or less willingly, as did my father and my uncles. I am proud of them, I am proud of my son.
Although a national draft would spread participation in military service more democratically, I would not ask anyone to participate unwillingly. I do not believe in impressment or involuntary servitude. I do wish, however, that those who did not or do not serve would be less willing to send those who do into battle and, once committing American troops to combat, more vigorous in their support for the soldiers and marines whose boots are on the ground and fund entirely the nation’s commitment. The current costs of the Iraq War are only the tip of the iceberg: the Army must be rebuilt, veterans will require long term treatment for the effects of seeing your buddy killed by an explosion or shot through the head, and the wounded disabled must be cared for and not discarded once they are no longer needed.
Republican or Democratic, Green Party, Socialist, Hawk or Anti-War, we must all remember our dead, the ones who fought the wars when we asked them, the ones, who like my friends in the Viet Nam War, like my friends in the Iraq War never return home except in a flag-draped casket. We need to remember their families, those who have lost spouses, the children who have lost their mother or father, the parents who have lost their sons or daughters. For them, the war will never end.
 And so I send my son the marine off to battle a second time, knowing the odds are good he will return to watch me grow old, knowing that he might not. I wish I could place a magic force field around him and all the other troops protecting them from the war and the vacant promises of politicians who have never committed themselves to winning the battle they ask others to fight.
 Ms. Lisa Jain Thompson is the Co-Founder & President of TS-Si, Inc. She also serves as a Contributing Editor and columnist for the TS-Si website. Ms. Thompson's signed articles contain her own opinions and do not necessarily convey an official position of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. Lisa welcomes your comments. You can use the public form below or send private correspondence via her TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.
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| Last Updated on Sunday, 25 May 2008 09:18 |
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