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War in Iraq
Defeat Without End
By Robert C. Koehler
03/02/08 "ICH"
-- - “Many in this chamber understand that America must not
fail in Iraq, because you understand that the consequences of
failure would be grievous and far-reaching . .”
There it is again, that choking lie, so smoothly administered —
with just enough fear to help America gag down all that
righteousness.
President Bush told it again in his final State of the Union
address the other night, of course. What choice did he have? The
truth, coming from him at this point, would be . . . too weird,
too offensive, impossible to comprehend.
But the truth is that we’ve already failed in Iraq, and
throughout the Middle East and Central Asia — failed with
consequences beyond reckoning. God knows someone will have to
take a swig of political courage and acknowledge it one of these
days, simply to stop the lie — the lies, a governmental cluster
bomb of them — from doing further harm.
It’s common knowledge now that we “went to war on a lie” — the
WMD scam — but what isn’t common knowledge is how the war is
sustained on a daily basis by lies and partial truths and
desperate, behind-the-scenes financial damage control. The war
is all weapons systems and public relations, with the reality of
wrecked countries and wrecked lives and a hemorrhaging of the
national treasury suspended in media hoodoo and denial.
Consider the number 72,000. This number — of total U.S.
battlefield casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, through
Jan. 5, 2008 — is simple enough, but as I ponder the fact that
Paul Sullivan and his organization, Veterans for Common Sense,
had to wrest it from the Department of Defense with a Freedom of
Information Act request, and the fact that the only media outlet
to pick up on it so far is the Scottish newspaper The Herald, I
begin to grasp the extent of the deception in place sustaining
the war on terror.
The reason that the casualty totals reported are far lower,
Sullivan explained to me, is that the Defense Department
releases the stats on only one category of battlefield casualty
to the media, the number of GIs “wounded” in action, that is,
harmed by the instrumentation of war: bullet, shrapnel or knife.
A GI who cracks his head on the windshield of his Humvee in a
crash, though he may have suffered brain damage and had to be
evacuated from the battlefield, is considered “injured,” not
“wounded,” Sullivan explained, and thus doesn’t show up in the
figure the DoD releases and the media misleadingly report.
Likewise, a GI who suffers a heart attack, or, let’s say, one of
those desert mystery illnesses, or a severe emotional collapse,
is “ill,” not “wounded,” and is also MIA from the official
casualty count. And in this way does the war remain a tad more
statistically palatable to a distracted public.
“This administration has a concerted plan to conceal the human
and financial costs of these two wars to maintain public
support,” said Sullivan, a Gulf War 1 vet and former Veterans
Administration project manager who was blowing the whistle on
the shoddy quality of vets’ health care long before the
Washington Post “broke” the Walter Reed scandal a year ago.
“There are some in the VA — top political appointees — who are
fundamentally opposed to providing health care to vets,”
Sullivan went on, talking about the deeper deceptions of the war
on terror that keep the political debate focused on vague future
“consequences of failure” rather than the present-day
consequences of a criminally inept, shoot-from-the-hip foreign
policy of aggression.
It is at this level of deception that things get horrific: in
the denial of care for physically and, especially, emotionally
wounded vets — men and women suffering from the private hell of
post-traumatic stress disorder.
“VA hospitals and clinics have already treated 263,909 unplanned
patients from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,” according to a
Vets for Common Sense press release. “On top of that, VA
reported 245,034 unanticipated disability claims from veterans
of the two wars.”
Note well the words “unplanned” and “unanticipated.” This facet
of the Bush administration’s lack of planning for its invasions
has so far escaped significant notice. Apparently the neocon
brain trust expected such a cakewalk that the costs and
logistics of GI medical care weren’t taken into account.
Sullivan said he fully expects the VA to face as many as 700,000
patient claims — including staggering numbers of PTSD claims as
our battle-weary troops “deploy for a third or fourth combat
tour in an escalating war that surrounds our troops with
360-degree combat 24 hours per day” — which could run up a tab
of $700 billion. The only way to control this monster expense is
routine claim denial.
“This administration is so absolutely corrupt, incompetent and
malevolent, it pales anything that came before it,” Sullivan
said. “Why is our economy tanking? The war, the war, the war.”
Note particularly that the human and financial costs Sullivan
and others are making are not “projections” for an endless war
but estimates based on where things stand at the moment. But
this is a war we can keep on losing into the indefinite future.
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist,
is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated
writer. You can respond to this column at bkoehler@tribune.com
or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com. © 2008 Tribune Media
Services, Inc.
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