Veterans for Common Sense

September 17, 2008, Savannah, GA – A soldier was detained in Iraq after he allegedly opened fire on a superior and another unit member, killing them both, the Army said Wednesday.

The soldier was subdued by other troops, and medics tried unsuccessfully to save the wounded soldiers, said Maj. Gen. Anthony Cucolo, commanding general at Fort Stewart in southern Georgia, where the soldiers’ unit is based.

An Army spokesman said the shooting happened Sunday in Tunnis, Iraq. The slain soldiers and the alleged shooter, whose name was not released, belong to the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division.

The Army identified the slain soldiers as Staff Sgt. Darris J. Dawson, 24, of Pensacola, Fla., and Sgt. Wesley R. Durbin, 26, of Hurst, Texas. Both were assigned to the brigade’s 3rd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment.

“We also know the accused is in custody — in control of military authorities in theater for now — and the investigation is under way,” Cucolo said in a release that gave few other details.

A defense official in Washington, D.C., said the alleged shooter is a sergeant who was in a meeting to discuss his leadership performance with Dawson, who was his squad leader, and Durbin, who was a fellow team leader in the squad. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the incident have not been released.

Fort Stewart spokesman Kevin Larson said he did not know if the soldier in custody had been charged by military authorities.

Dawson’s stepmother, Maxine Mathis, said the Army had told the soldier’s family few details other than that he was killed by a fellow U.S. soldier.

“I can’t say he died for his country, dying like that,” a weeping Mathis said from her home in Pensacola.

Cucolo called the deaths “a tragic and senseless loss of two professional soldiers … who were also husbands and fathers.”

Mathis, whose husband is Dawson’s biological father, said her stepson joined the Army immediately after graduating from high school six years ago. He was serving his third combat tour in Iraq, and had re-enlisted not long before he was killed.

Mathis said he told her, “Momma, I’m not so afraid of the enemy. I’m afraid of our young guys over there, because they’re so jumpy and so quick to shoot.”

September 17, 2008 – As Gen. David Petraeus departs Iraq to lead U.S. Central Command, Vets for Freedom is airing a new television commercial that compares his views on the Iraq “troop surge” with those of Sen. Barack Obama.

“I think we’re making progress, and progress is defined as progress towards winning,” Petraeus is seen saying in the ad.

“The surge has not worked,” Obama says, stating in a later clip that, “My assessment is that the surge has not worked.”

“The military objectives of the surge are in fact being met,” Petraeus counters in another clip.

The ad asks viewers to call Obama’s Senate office to urge him to support Senate Resolution 636, a resolution “recognizing the strategic success of the troop surge in Iraq and expressing gratitude to the members of the United States Armed Forces who made that success possible.”

The group will spend $400,000 to air the ad this week in primetime on CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC. It is part of a $7 million campaign that includes television advertising and events hosted nationwide. While the group’s Web site says it will support “those who support victory,” its advertising has exhibited a pro-McCain stance.

September 18, 2008 – My nephew, U.S. Army Sgt. Coleman Bean, died earlier this month. He was 25, and he took his own life. I’ve spent this week in New Jersey, where Coleman lived, helping his parents and brothers get through this terrible time. Over 300 people attended Coleman’s memorial service in Milltown. Many of them were young men that Coleman had served with in the military.

Coleman signed up for the Army on Sept. 5, 2001, almost seven years exactly to the day he died. He was with the 173rd Airborne, and parachuted into Iraq at the start of the invasion. He served his country honorably, and was discharged in 2005.

Coleman, however, had trouble readjusting to civilian life, and he was being treated for post traumatic stress disorder. Unfortunately for Coleman, he was a part of the Individual Ready Reserve. In 2007, he was called back to duty. As hard as it was for him, Coleman felt that he couldn’t let his fellow soldiers down by refusing the call. He served another tour of Iraq with the Maryland National Guard. Coleman was released from active duty in May of 2008, and he still held reserve status, meaning that he could have been called back to duty yet again. He was waiting to get treatment for his PTSD when he took his own life.

At the wake following Coleman’s memorial service, we heard stories from several of the soldiers who had served with Coleman. The most poignant of these stories came from Sgt. Melson, who had the job of preparing the Maryland National Guard for their tour in Iraq. Sgt. Melson looked to Coleman, as a returning soldier, to be an example for the group. Although Coleman was unhappy that he had been recalled, he took it upon himself to make sure that each of those soldiers was prepared to face what lay ahead. Even though Coleman hated to get up in the morning, he took it upon himself to be up and get everyone else up for physical training. If a soldier was having difficulty getting his running times down, it was Coleman who ran extra to help him get into shape. Sgt. Melson said that Coleman told him he wanted these soldiers to come home safe and he knew that training would help them do just that.

Coleman was just that type of a man. He looked out for others. He helped people through the tough times. He looked out for those who needed help.

Unfortunately, our country didn’t look out for him when he needed help. Even though he was diagnosed with PTSD after his first tour, our country activated him from the Individual Ready Reserve, and made him go again. It provided no counseling to him when he came home the second time, and he was on a waiting list to get treatment.

Recent statistics show that Iraqi war veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 46 per 100,000 people, which is more than double the rate of the general population of 20 per 100,000. One of the main antagonists causing this problem is multiple deployments, such as utilizing the Individual Ready Reserve. More importantly, the Veteran’s Administration is not providing the treatment these returning soldiers need and deserve. Coleman’s death will not be counted among the Iraq war casualties, but he was a casualty of this war nontheless.

At the memorial service, one of Coleman’s brothers said that when the three brothers went out, they would always drink a toast “To the way things should be.” Rather than toasting to the way things should be, we as a country need to act to make this the way it should be. End the war in Iraq. End the multiple deployments. Treat these returning soldiers with the respect and care they deserve. Here’s to Coleman, and the way things should be.

September 15, 2008 – Sarah Palin may not have known what the Bush Doctrine was, but we’re getting a pretty good idea of what the Palin Doctrine is. Or will be — because it’s still currently under construction. And what is it going to look like? Let’s just say, it’s going to seem familiar.

According to London’s Daily Telegraph, the architects of the Palin Doctrine are a group of people who have been singularly wrong about virtually everything in the last decade — the neocons, who have been briefing Palin for weeks.

As predicted, the fact that she didn’t know anything wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. She’s perfect for the neocons: likeable on the outside, a blank slate on the inside. To borrow from an old cliché, if Sarah Palin didn’t exist, the neocons would have had to invent her.

In fact, this is how one former White House aide describes her: “She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her.”

Of course, the place her neocon mentors hope she’s going is the White House. Given their dismal track record, they’re smart enough to figure that the American public wouldn’t be too keen on letting them in the front door again, so they are trying to sneak in hidden behind Palin’s skirt. The Trojan Moose approaches.

The Daily Telegraph details how the neocon talent scouts spotted their political Eliza Doolittle back in the summer of ’07. The love connection began, appropriately enough, on a love boat:

“Sources in the McCain camp, the Republican Party and Washington think tanks say Mrs. Palin was identified as a potential future leader of the neoconservative cause in June 2007. That was when the annual summer cruise organised by the right-of-centre Weekly Standard magazine docked in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, and the pundits on board took tea with Governor Palin.”

So nice to meet you, Governor. And don’t forget, cucumber sandwiches and preemptive invasions on the Lido Deck at four!

Not surprisingly, Palin’s biggest fan is Bill Kristol, who describes her as the “specter of a young, attractive, unapologetic conservatism” that “is haunting the liberal elites.”

Among her other Henry Higginses is neo-neocon Joe Lieberman, who is reportedly helping prep Palin for the big ball — her debate with Joe Biden.

She’s already passed her first test with flying colors: being willing to link 9/11 with Iraq, something not even the president is still willing to do. Last week, she told a group of Iraq-bound soldiers that they were going to “defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans.”

By George (Bush), I think she’s got it! Congratulations, Professor Kristol, your student is coming along just fine.

Of course, the neocons know they already have an ally at the top of the GOP ticket. McCain may have been a reformer on campaign finance, but when it comes to foreign policy, he has always been solidly in the neocon club. He loves to burnish his foreign policy bona fides by talking about how he wanted to fire Donald Rumsfeld months before Bush did. But he doesn’t talk a lot about how, in the days immediately after 9/11, he was part of the neocon crowd itching to get into Iraq.

Just a few days after the attack, McCain was already talking about “some other countries” that helped Bin Laden. Countries like Syria, Iran, and…Iraq. And a few weeks later, during an October 18, 2001 appearance on David Letterman, McCain answered a question about how the war in Afghanistan was going by announcing that the invasion of Iraq would be “the second phase” of the war on terror (how prescient of him to know that Saddam wouldn’t give up those nonexistent WMD). What’s more, he tried to buttress the case for attacking Iraq by claiming that the recent spate of anthrax attacks “may have come from Iraq.” Or Fort Detrick.

Six years later, demonstrating how little he’s learned from the debacle in Iraq, McCain hired Randy Scheunemann, a neocon darling who helped form The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, as his campaign’s chief foreign policy advisor.

As TPMMuckraker noted in July, “Of all the hawkish Washington foreign-policy types pushing both before and after 9/11 for war with Iraq — a war that an overwhelming majority of Americans now considers a mistake — Scheunemann, though not a marquee name, was among the most energetic and influential. And in the invasion’s aftermath, he consistently opposed steps that might have helped stabilize the country.”

And now, according to the Daily Telegraph, Scheunemann is briefing Sarah Palin.

McCain’s selection of Palin may have been reckless, but it was anything but random. The neocons’ view of the world may be disastrous, dangerous, discredited, and deadly — but it’s far from dead. Their patron saint, Dick Cheney, the scowling embodiment of the Neocon Doctrine, had way too much baggage — and way too low approval ratings — to mount a run for the White House.

That’s why the Palin pick was so brilliant. On the outside, she’s exponentially more likable and talented at connecting with people than Cheney ever was. But on the inside, once she graduates from the neocon finishing school, she’ll be a complete and total Dick. Cheney. With lipstick.

September 17, 2008 – As Wall Street collapsed with a bang, almost no one noticed that we’re on the brink of war with Pakistan. And, unfortunately, that’s not too much of an exaggeration. On Tuesday, the Pakistan’s military ordered its forces along the Afghan border to repulse all future American military incursions into Pakistan. The story has been subsequently downplayed, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mike Mullen, flew to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, to try to ease tensions. But the fact remains that American forces have and are violating Pakistani sovereignty.

You have to wonder whether the Bush administration understands what it is getting into. In case anyone has forgotten, Pakistan has a hundred plus nuclear weapons. It’s a country on the edge of civil war. Its political leadership is bitterly divided. In other words, it’s the perfect recipe for a catastrophe.

All of which begs the question, is it worth the ghost hunt we’ve been on since September 11? There has not been a credible sighting of Osama bin Laden since he escaped from Tora Bora in October 2001. As for al-Qaeda, there are few signs it’s even still alive, other than a dispersed leadership taking refuge with the Taliban. Al-Qaeda couldn’t even manage to post a statement on the Internet marking September 11, let alone set off a bomb.

U.S. forces have been entering Pakistan for the last six years. But it was always very quietly, usually no more than a hundred yards in, and usually to meet a friendly tribal chieftain. Pakistan knew about these crossings, but it turned a blind eye because it was never splashed across the front page of the country’s newspapers. This has all changed in the last month, as the Administration stepped up Predator missile attacks. And then, after the New York Times ran an article that U.S. forces were officially given the go-ahead to enter Pakistan without prior Pakistani permission, Pakistan had no choice but to react.

On another level the Bush Administration’s decision to step up attacks in Pakistan is fatally reckless, because the cross-border operations’ chances of capturing or killing al Qaeda’s leadership are slim. American intelligence isn’t good enough for precision raids like this. Pakistan’s tribal regions are a black hole that even Pakistani operatives can’t enter and come back alive. Overhead surveillance and intercepts do little good in tracking down people in a backward, rural part of the world like this.

On top of it, is al-Qaeda worth the candle? Yes, some deadender in New York or London could blow himself up in the subway and leave behind a video claiming the attack in the name of al-Qaeda. But our going into Pakistan, risking a full-fledged war with a nuclear power, isn’t going to stop him.

Finally, there is Pakistan itself, a country that truly is on the edge of civil war. Should we be adding to the force of chaos? By indiscriminately bombing the tribal areas along the Afghan border, we in effect are going to war with Pakistan’s ethnic Pashtuns. They make up 15{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of Pakistan’s 167 million people. They are well armed and among the most fierce and xenophobic people in the world. It is not beyond their military capabilities to cross the Indus and take Islamabad.

Before it is too late, someone needs to sit the President down and give him the bad news that Pakistan is a bridge too far in the “war on terror”