Bush is responsible for the death of Kevin Shea and other Americans killed in Iraq
By Kevin Shay
09/18/04 "ICH" -- I woke up Friday morning to a radio voice announcing that someone with my same name had been killed in Iraq. Talk about a wake-up call.
Although I have consistently opposed the unwise 2003 Iraqi invasion through letters to politicians and the media, columns on Internet ezines and participation in protests since 2002, I have to admit that lately I have tuned out the daily reports of fresh hell coming out of Iraq. But Friday's announcement shook me from those temporary doldrums, making me wonder just who was this man with my name, who like more than 1,000 other Americans, had been unfortunate enough to die in this offensive, empire-building war that was started by lies.
The Bush administration callously offered little insight into the life of Major Kevin Shea, a communications officer in the Marines whose last name sounds like mine, even if it is spelled slightly different [my ancestors once spelled their name that way, but changed it after getting tired of people pronouncing it "Shee"].
If it was up to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Andrew Card, Don Evans, John Bolton, Asa Hutchinson, Spencer Abraham and other administration chickenhawks who used various schemes and excuses to avoid military combat when they were younger, only to now send other people's sons and daughters to die in similar situations, most Americans would never know Major Shea existed. His body would be quietly slipped into this country, as so many have been before, and be quickly buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
There is a political reason why Bush has never attended a funeral service for one of the 1,027 U.S. troops killed in Iraq, about a 600 percent increase from the 148 Americans killed in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf conflict. There is a beyond-callous reason why Bush to this day refuses to allow the flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to be photographed by news media.
Bush doesn't want to call attention to those American lives his shallow, selfish, short-sighted foreign policy sacrificed, to any negative reminders of the ultimate price paid by others for his lies and stupidity, especially in an election year. Bush wants to hold onto power by any means necessary, even if polls show that a majority of Americans don't believe Bush deserves four more years.
The short statement from the U.S. Defense Department about Major Shea said that he was killed by enemy fire in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, where some Iraqis have resisted the U.S. military presence that has continued long after Bush said the Iraqi conflict was essentially over. Since that May 2003 statement by Bush, almost 900 U.S. troops - 87 percent of the total
number - have died. That's a lot of Americans to die in a war that's supposed to be over. And we don't even count the tens of thousands of Iraqis, including children who look somewhat like my young, part Arab-American son and daughter, who have died in this conflict.
I had to turn to other sources to discover that Major Shea was tragically killed on his 38th birthday, just one month before he was scheduled to return home. He had a wife, a 10-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son in California. He frequently e-mailed his family with photos of him next to smiling Iraqi children. He wanted to help rebuild Iraqi schools.
The Washington Post reported that friends and relatives described Major Shea as a "caring, generous man who left a deep imprint on people during a military career that began at the Air Force Academy and continued through a teaching stint at the Naval Academy and two conflicts in the Middle East."
Like me, Major Shea was born in Washington, D.C., and lived in Dallas at one time. Unlike me, he earned a master's of science degree in electrical engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in California. Major Shea enjoyed running, sailing and rugby, even coaching and tutoring the rugby team at the Naval Academy, where he also taught electrical engineering. He was so popular among students that he was voted an honorary member of the Class of 2003.
Major Shea was sent to Iraq in February, "hoping that the U.S. military could help the population, and that he could help young Marines," the Post wrote. "His goal was to bring them all back safe and sound," said his mother, Eileen Shea of Washington, D.C.
In one e-mail to his parents, Shea wrote that he didn't agree with some of the political decisions made in Iraq, but that "orders are orders." In another e-mail, he told his parents that a brief satellite-phone conversation with his son "made my day."
And now, thanks to Bush and Cheney, Major Shea will not physically see his son and daughter again, who will have to grow up in a world made colder by the heartless policies of Bush and Cheney, despite the heroic attempts of people like Major Shea to make it better.
The Bush campaign even had Sue Niederer, the mother of Army Lt. Seth Dvorin, who was killed in February in Iraq, arrested on Thursday for merely asking a question of First Stepford Wife Laura Bush during a New Jersey campaign event. Niederer, who wore a shirt with a photo of her son that read "President Bush, You Killed My Son," was actually handcuffed and charged with trespassing, even though she had a ticket to the event.
Niederer asked the First Stepford Wife why her daughters and the children of other politicians weren't serving in Iraq. "At that point, it became chaotic and I was pushed and shoved," Niederer told a local New Jersey paper. "They engulfed me. It wasn't plain, ordinary folks, but people in suits with earphones."
The Nazi-like crowd chanted "four more years" as Secret Service agents surrounded Niederer, handcuffed her and led her to a police van. At least one person at the event spoke in her defense, saying, "She has a right to speak. She's a mother."
Strange treatment by Bush officials of someone who gave the ultimate sacrifice, who only wanted to ask a question. But that’s Bush’s America, where you get arrested, shouted down by a robotic, jingoistic, goose-stepping crowd and accused of treason for simply asking a question.
And some Americans wonder why some compare our country’s political climate to the early stages of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Even Bush supporters say he lied
To those who say Bush didn't lie his way into this war, even partisan Republicans who voted for Bush in 2000, such as Paul Sperry, Washington bureau chief of WorldNetDaily, have admitted he lied about his reasons for invading Iraq. To this date, the alleged weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had that made that oil-rich country an “imminent threat” to us, that Bush used to justify the invasion, have yet to be found. For that alone, Bush should be voted, if not impeached, from office.
While conservatives always drone on about taking personal responsibility, few are calling for Bush to accept blame in this Iraq mess. Bush and others blame faulty intelligence but ignore how they pushed for intelligence reports to justify their invasion plans.
Bush neo-conservative administration officials like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are on record as supporting an invasion of Iraq as part of their dreams of an American empire as long ago as 1997, according to the Philadelphia Daily News. In a letter to then-President Clinton signed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others who later joined the Bush cabal, wrote that Clinton should invade Iraq and remove Hussein to “enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world.”
In September 2000, the neo-conservative think tank Project for the New American Century released a report that advocated that the U.S. assert its military dominance over the world to shape “the international security order in line with American principles and interests,” push for “regime change” in Iraq and China, among other countries, and “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.” Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Libby and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush were prominent members of the Washington, D.C.-based organization.
“The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” the publication said. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”
The report added the U.S. military needed to be transformed to control not just the Middle East and other regions, but space and cyberspace, even to the points of establishing “U.S. Space Forces” and developing biological and electrical weapons. This transformation would likely take a long time “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor,” the authors wrote.
In October 2002, a year after the U.S. attacked Afghanistan and a few months before its invasion of Iraq, a Pentagon committee recommended the formation of a “super-intelligence body” that would launch operations to “stimulate reactions” among terrorists and states that supposedly had weapons of mass destruction, according to the Los Angeles Times. The body would prod terrorists to action to justify attacks by the U.S.
Clinton, who many Republicans accused of wagging the dog when he attacked bin Laden with missiles in 1998, as Republicans were then more interested in Monica Lewinsky than bin Laden, even said he warned Bush before he left office in 2001 that bin Laden was the biggest security threat the U.S. faced. Clinton said Bush maintained that Iraq was a bigger threat than bin Laden, according to a Reuters article. Former Bush officials like Paul O’Neill confirmed how focused Bush and others were in going after Hussein in their early months.
That’s why Sue Niederer and others are justified in saying that Bush holds the ultimate responsibility for the deaths of their loved ones in Iraq.
Even Republicans question Bush’s Iraq rhetoric
Recently, Bush said to a National Guard convention that ”our strategy is succeeding” in Iraq. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, respected Nebraska Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel said Bush’s claim is “beyond pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing. It is now in the zone of dangerous.”
Analysts who said the effort is going fine a few months ago have now flip-flopped. Michael O'Hanlon, a defense specialist at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Council aide testified to a Congressional panel just ten months ago that the “overall effort in Iraq is succeeding.” But this week, O'Hanlon sang a different tune at a forum sponsored by Brookings and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“We're in much worse shape than I thought we'd ever be,” he said. “I don't know how you get it back.”
“The bottom line is, at this moment we are losing the war,” retired Col. Andrew Bacevich of Boston University told USA Today. “That doesn't mean it is lost, but we are losing, and as an observer it is difficult for me to see that either the civilian leaderhsip or the military leadership has any plausible idea on how to turn this around.”
Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the Bush administration’s special envoy to the Middle East and commander of the U.S. Central Command in the Middle East in the late 1990s, recently said senior Pentagon officials were guilty of "dereliction of duty" for poor strategic thinking, operational planning and ground execution. Lack of basic equipment has been a continuous problem in this war; the Army did not fully equip soldiers with bullet-proof vests until June 2004, as many soldiers had to pay for such vests themselves.
"The course is headed over Niagara Falls," Zinni told CBS News. "I think it’s time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it’s been a failure."
Tom Hutchinson, 69, a conservative retired businessman and professor from Sturgeon, Mo., who volunteered for the Bush campaign in 2000, recently told the Associated Press that the war was a "total travesty" and he may sit out the 2004 election for the first time since 1956.
Morale among troops shows signs of lowering. Soldiers from a combat unit at Fort Carson in Colorado said they are being threatened to be deployed back to Iraq unless they re-enlist for three more years, according to the Rocky Mountain News.
"I don't want to go back to Iraq," one sergeant told the News. "I went through a lot of things for the Army that weren't necessary and were risky. Iraq has changed a lot of people."
A military study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July found that 16 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and 11 percent from Afghanistan might suffer major depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.
And anyone who thinks Bush is telling the truth when he says he formed a substantial international coalition for this Iraq war can count the relatively tiny numbers of war dead for other countries. The British military has reported 65 deaths, compared to more than 1,000 for the U.S. The others: Italy, 19; Poland, 13; Spain, 11; Ukraine, eight; Bulgaria, six; Slovakia, three; Thailand and the Netherlands, two; and Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Hungary and Latvia, one.
We’re basically fighting this one ourselves.
More reasons not to vote for Bush
Author and columnist Arianna Huffington, another former conservative, recently wrote an overview of Bush's record since he took office. That included:
· 1.2 million more Americans have lost their jobs without finding new ones, making him the only modern-day president to preside over net job losses.
· The number of Americans living below the poverty line has increased by 4.3 million to 35.9 million, with 12.9 million of them children.
· The number of Americans with no health insurance has increased by 5.8 million to about 45 million.
· Median household income has fallen more than $1,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars in the last three years, and the wages of most workers are now falling behind inflation.
· The average tuition for college has risen by 34 percent.
· One-third of Bush’s $1.7 trillion in tax cuts benefits only the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans. Almost half will go to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.
· Bush also failed to fulfill his pledge to get bin Laden "dead or alive," traded the moral high
ground for pre-emptive war and the horrors of Abu Ghraib, pulled out of the Kyoto agreement on global warming, gutted the Clean Air Act, initiated the rollback of more than 200 environmental regulations, backed a constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriages, which would be the first time in history a federal amendment would be used to deny an American’s rights and did not follow through on his promise to extend the assaultweapons ban.
Add to that piling up record budget deficits. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, also put together a great by-the-numbers list at http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=557746.
So the question we often get back is: How is Sen. John Kerry better than Bush? For one thing, look at the two biographies – both came from wealthy families, but Kerry enlisted in the Vietnam War and served honorably, while Bush used family connections to get out of combat and eventually went AWOL. Kerry spoke out eloquently against the war after it droned on for years with little purpose, except enriching defense contractors, and became a prosecutor and politician who didn’t accept money from big PACs in his first campaigns. Bush was an alcoholic who also snorted cocaine at times and had to have his father’s friends bail him out of failed businesses.
Kerry has a record of working on issues that help all Americans, such as campaign finance reform, equal rights and the Family and Medical Leave Act, while Bush mostly carries water for his base, the super-wealthy power elite. Kerry has read many books all the way through and even written his own. Bush has rarely, if ever, read a book all the way through and had his bio ghost-written. Kerry can speak eloquently without a teleprompter. Bush hasn’t a clue what to do or say when Karl Rove or Karen Hughes, who even mouths the words for Bush behind the teleprompter, are not around. The list goes on.
One more reason not to vote for Bush: So the families of Major Kevin Shea and others can put this Iraq nightmare behind them. If Bush somehow steals another election, there will be more nightmares ahead in countries like Iran and Syria, that’s for sure.
Kevin Shay [kevinjshay@justice.com] is a Washington, D.C.-area journalist/writer.
The latest book to which he contributed, Big Bush Lies, was published by RiverWood Books of Ashland, Ore., and is available in Barnes and Noble and other bookstores across the country.
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