February 10, 2007
US veteran points out the idiocies of the surge.
Although I don't usually like linking to Counterpunch because of their blatant anti-semitism, they occasionally publish some useful articles, as
this one by an American Vietnam vet, "An Open Letter to America's Soldiers from the Ranks: The Looming Shadow of Nuremberg". He makes a number of good points, about the idiocies of trying to win a counter-insurgency in a country where you don't speak the language and everyone hates you, and others, which are excellent but which have been made before. But I was particularly intrigued by his point that the so-called "surge" is in actuality a plan to reinforce the protection around the Green Zone before an attack on Iran. Interesting idea.
Let me tell you a little secret about the plan to parcel you out in small groups and isolate you in Iraqi units. This was tried in Vietnam with disastrous results, with adjectives like suicidal. And that was before we had really gotten serious about killing people over there. How can you tell who the enemy is? Do you speak the Iraqi language and understand the culture? That friendly Iraqi kid or little girl in a burka may be taking reams of mental notes about your unit strength, equipment, and movement patterns to relay to their big brothers with the IEDs, RPGs and AKs. They may even be humping bags of ammo or ordnance and running commo for insurgents.
Count your fingers for the number of new insurgents every dead civilian creates. Rape a girl and murder her family to cover it up, and you'll need a computer. Don't forget to factor in the damage from 50,000 armed-to-the-teeth mercenaries, many of whom not only don't speak Iraqi, they don't even speak English. Always remember that none of these people invited you there to blow their country apart. Imagine how you'd feel if some friendly invaders and a bunch of their salaried thugs had wasted New York City and killed the entire population.
I can tell you from experience that it's impossible to win any kind of guerilla war without the support of the population and while soldiering from a defensive position. Have your missions turned from search and clear to search and avoid like ours did? Do you have a mentality of "the day is yours, the night is theirs"? If that's true, the situation has disintegrated into a war of attrition and you've lost.
Put aside from the moral conundrum of nuking a non-nuke country that has signed the non-proliferation treaty to keep that country from maybe getting nukes of its own, and all on behalf of another country that already has hundreds of nukes and refuses to sign any such treaties. An attack on Iran means you will be trapped between a rock and a hard place. Make no mistake: the real reason for the "surge" into Bagdad is to reinforce security around the laptop warriors and bureaucrats in the Green Zone. You'll find yourselves in the curious position of playing bodyguard for the hired guns. How ironic will that be?
Think about your families and loved ones. A large number of you are serving multiple tours, with many involuntarily extended. For the latter, your country has violated the contract it signed with you, but just try breaking your end of it. Meanwhile, military families suffer at home, a significant number of you will not have jobs to return to, and unbelievably, your government is doing its best to slash or delay veteran's benefits. For those of you who come home wounded, it will take years to get a VA disability claim processed if you succeed at all.
It's a powerful, emotional article, well worth reading. But note the little bit in the second paragraph of the quote he gives at the beginning, about "Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah, the rape of Lebanon, the concentration camps in the West Bank and Gaza." Even though Israel and the US are separate countries, involved in separate actions (no Israelis are serving in Iraq, no Americans are in the West Bank and Gaza), the anti-Semites try to distort the facts to tie them together. Observe the way the propaganda works. And note the use of the term "concentration camps" to refer to prisons in Israel, but not to Abu Ghraib and others run by the Americans, although its known throughout the world how much worse conditions are in Iraqi prisons these days.
It's part of the ongoing attempt by some Aemricans to blame Israel and the Jews for the major war crimes Americans are committing. You'll nearly always find nasty little bits of anti-Semitism in Counterppunch articles about the mideast, always, always, always. They're simply incapable of objectivity about the Jews. Part of it of course is just that the folks at Counterpunch are Americans, and like virtually all Americans these days, left and right it makes no difference, they are desperately trying to cover up the extent of the war crimes that all Americans are responsible for. But they're liberals, and liberals never accept responsibility for anything since it's always somebody else's fault, and so they need to find someone such as the Jews to blame.
