Veterans for Common Sense

If the only thing we still have to fear is fear itself, there is more than enough to go around.

When President Roosevelt coined the phrase in his inaugural address in 1933, he used it to banish fear and steel the nation’s courage in facing down the Great Depression.

Seventy years later to the month, President Bush is using fear as a weapon, not to build courage among Americans but to stampede them into endorsing a case for a war that has been built literally on a grab bag of possibilities, contingencies, ifs and maybes, of things that haven’t happened but could happen, of bad guys who might hit us if we don’t hit them first.

This is a created crisis. Now that the crisis is upon us, we can only hope that it passes quickly, with minimum loss of life on either side, and that our native skepticism prevents it from happening again.

Supporters of the war have presented some strong arguments–Saddam Hussein’s repeated flouting of UN resolutions, or his reign of terror over the Iraqi people. But when Bush made his final case for war in his ultimatum speech to the nation Tuesday night, what came through instead was the voice of a frightened man trying to infect the nation with his fear.

In the short term, this fear is working. In times of crisis, it often does. When the president of the United States sounds the alarm, the natural instinct of Americans is to rally to his side, to assume that he knows the facts and is reacting to a real danger.

The hunch that the danger is mostly imaginary is as unproven as are most of the administration’s justifications for this war.

Fear has finally given Bush the popular backing for the war that had eluded him since he first began campaigning for it. Less than six months ago, barely 20 percent of Americans told pollsters that they would approve a war on Iraq without the backing of allies or the UN. Now that support is more than 70 percent, even though the UN has refused its backing and the allied support ranges from the plausible, like Britain, through the symbolic, like Iceland, to the ludicrous, like Azerbaijan or Eritrea.

Most of the rest of the world remains unconvinced, not out of affection for Hussein but out of conviction that Bush and his neoconservative advisers have manufactured an unneeded war, for reasons of their own, and are leading an America that, with its power and lack of restraint, is more dangerous to world order than Hussein ever could be.

“As much as one would like to get Saddam Hussein out of power, this is going to be George Bush’s war,” said the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

Too many Americans, cheered on by the administration, blame this attitude on the French. But it takes more than Gallic lures to persuade so much of the world, including allies who have stood beside us in conflicts through the past half-century, to desert us on this one.

National hysteria

The fact is that national hysteria does not translate well. Americans not only are afraid but they are isolated in their fear, with a few scattered sympathizers, like Albania and Uzbekistan, arrayed against the overwhelming opinion of a world that thinks we have gone collectively nuts.

Most commentators, noting the macho strutting of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the president’s insistence that the world is either for us or against us, have blamed the Iraq policy more on testosterone than terror, with an unhealthy dash of hyper-religious certainty mixed in. But Bush often comes across as truly frightened, convinced of threats that the rest of the world just doesn’t see.

These presidential fears were on full display in his ultimatum speech.

The president claimed that Hussein has “some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” By any reckoning, this just isn’t true. No one doubts that Iraq has developed chemical and biological weapons of uncertain effectiveness, as have many other nations.

But effective anthrax? Not known. Smallpox? No evidence. Nuclear weapons? Certainly not now.

“The danger is clear,” Bush said. “Using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq . . . terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in one country or another.”

“Clear dangers” seldom contain so many ifs or coulds, so many varied weapons in the hands of so many unidentified terrorists intent on acting “one day . . . in one country or another.” If we don’t attack Hussein, the president surmised, he “might try to conduct terrorist operations.”

“These attacks are not inevitable,” he conceded, but “they are . . . possible. And this very fact underscores the reason we cannot live under the threat of blackmail.”

A possibility is not a fact but a guess, a worst-case worry that could be applied to any cloud on the international horizon. If there is a threat of blackmail here, it is self-imposed.

If the U.S. does not attack now, “in one year or five years the power of Iraq to inflict harm on all free nations would be multiplied many times over,” Bush said.

No sane analyst believes this. After 12 years of international sanctions, Iraq is weaker now than it was before the 1991 gulf war. Five years from now? Who knows? No one does, including the administration. But the thought that a Third World international pariah could multiply its strength and turn itself into a power sufficient to blackmail the most powerful nation in the history of the world is nothing but panic-mongering.

The result is a “pre-emptive” war that, by the administration’s own admission, breaks international law.

International law permits every nation to defend itself, by force if necessary. If a nation has evidence that an attack is imminent, it is legally justified in acting first, to hit before it is hit.

But no one, not even the administration, argues that an attack by Iraq is imminent. The president himself says the danger may be five years away. To strike Iraq now is to strike against a will-o’-the-wisp, not a certain danger, to hit the other guy before he even gets the gloves on. International law forbids this.

The Bush administration knows this and says the solution is not to obey the law but to change it.

The administration’s National Security Strategy, issued seven months ago, reads now like a preplanned justification for this war in its rejection of “traditional concepts of deterrence.”

The paper grants that international law “conditions the legitimacy of pre-emption on the existence of an imminent threat–most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.”

Obviously, the Iraq situation doesn’t meet that definition, so the paper says that “we must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.”

In other words, if international law does not let us chase mirages, then we rewrite the law.

Spreading the fear

This is the codification of fear, which seems to be in the saddle of national policy right now.

A policy based on fear works only if the fear is widely spread. The administration has worked hard to spread it, through repeated “orange alerts” and the recommended hoarding of emergency items such as duct tape. Terrorist threats exist, as 9/11 proved, but a terrified population is in no condition to sort out the real from the imaginary and take realistic precautions.

In times like this, we look to elected officials for leadership, but some seem almost unhinged by the terror in the air. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a physician, wrote that “physicians and policymakers have a duty to help keep people healthy and alive.” The threat from Hussein is so great and immediate, Frist said, that “preventive care” is needed now “to protect humanity. . . . Getting rid of his regime is our best inoculation.”

Frist does not seem to have realized that this “inoculation” will kill thousands of people, most of them Iraqis. Or perhaps he feels that the Hippocratic oath doesn’t apply to foreigners.

National hysterias come and go, leaving a great deal of damage and creating a sense of communal shame when the panic wears off: The McCarthyite era is an example. Invariably, the cause is fear–of foreigners, of nameless threats, of Reds under the bed.

The United States is going through such a hysteria now. We can only pray that not too many lives are sacrificed to it.

Up to nine dead Marines. A dozen soldiers in an Army convoy attacked and missing, some looking glum and scared in Iraqi custody while comrades lay dead nearby. Uncounted wounded on multiple, acrid battlefields.

Then the self-inflicted harm: a British warplane downed by American friendly fire, with two Britons dead; a deadly grenade attack on a U.S. compound in Kuwait blamed on an American soldier with “an attitude problem.”

The bad news was not confined to Iraq. In nearly forgotten Afghanistan, a Pave Hawk helicopter went down. Six died.

It’s not that everything was suddenly going wrong. It just seemed that way after a start that seemed to go almost all right. And now war leaders had to deal with images it hoped would never come from this invasion.

“Certainly, I don’t think that these pictures will damage either the psychology of our soldiers, morale of our soldiers or the steadfastness of our government or the resolve of our people,” said Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, deputy commander of the Central Command.

“We’re a pretty tough people.”

Through it all, the vanguard of the invasion force moved to within 100 miles of Baghdad on Sunday after an extraordinary push north, through a hail of machine-gun fire from a defeated Iraqi corps.

But the lasting image was of a terrified Army maintenance soldier, one of five captives interviewed by Iraqi TV as four bodies lay on the floor — their gruesome fate shown on Arab TV, but not here.

“I come to fix broke stuff,” he said when asked why he was in Iraq. He said he was from Kansas.

Asked Monday whether a lot of resistance had been expected, Lt. Col. Ronnie McCourt, a spokesman for British forces in the Gulf, said in Qatar: “That’s not unexpected. This is not a videogame where everything is clear and neat and tidy. Some enemy who feel that they want to carry on fighting will inevitably do so. We have contingency plans for this. We don’t take anything for granted.”

From President Bush down, officials warned from the start it wouldn’t be easy. “A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict,” Bush said on the night he unleashed the armed forces.

But officials also raised expectations that Iraqi soldiers might give up early on the defense of their country — shocked and awed out of their will to fight.

They said all 8,000 soldiers in Iraq’s 51st Mechanized Division in southern Iraq surrendered, then clarified that a day later. The division’s top commanders had given up and the troops had scattered.

Some U.S. officials led people to expect a quick campaign with precision munitions, retired CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro said Sunday.

“People thought the Iraqis would be waving little American flags like it was occupied France in World War II,” he said. “This is not an occupied country. It is Iraq and it is run by Iraqis, and for better or worse they are not welcoming Americans as liberators.

“… No one is welcoming the Americans until Saddam’s body is on the ground and people can go over and kick it,” Cannistraro added.

On Sunday, the casualty count rose. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saw the videotape of apparent American POWs for the first time while being interviewed on a TV news show.

Everyone acknowledged the fight was getting harder.

“A tough day of resistance is all relative, of course,” the Central Command’s Abizaid said. “It’s the toughest day of resistance that we’ve had thus far, but it’s also a day in which we have continued the attack in almost every area.”

The pain of it all was made worse in some minds because the troubles seemed the result of unfair fighting or dangers well out of the norm even for warfare. The Marines were assaulted by Iraqis who had flown the white flag of surrender, then opened up on them, officials said.

Everyone struggled to understand the bizarre grenade attack at a Kuwaiti command center of the 101st Airborne. An Army captain died and 15 soldiers were injured, three seriously. Sgt. Asan Akbar of the 326th Engineer Battalion was in custody.

“When somebody’s firing at you, you know who the enemy is,” said George Heath, spokesman for Fort Campbell, Ky., home of the 101st. “When they’re standing in the same … chow line, or using the same shower with you, it’s hard to recognize.”

The most disturbing images were used judiciously. CNN showed one still picture of a dead soldier, although the scene was hard to make out because of banner headlines on the screen.

In 1993, 18 Americans died in a 17-hour firefight with a Somali warlord’s militia and the bodies of two of the Americans were dragged through the streets. The United States quickly quit the peacekeeping operation.

No one expected Sunday’s setbacks to throw the United States or Britain off course. They’ve got 250,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators in place and their destination is Baghdad.

New York – We are at war again — not because of enemy attack, as in World War II, nor because of incremental drift, as in the Vietnam War — but because of the deliberate and premeditated choice of our own government.

Now that we are embarked on this misadventure, let us hope that our intervention will be swift and decisive, and that victory will come with minimal American, British and civilian Iraqi casualties.

But let us continue to ask why our government chose to impose this war. The choice reflects a fatal turn in U.S. foreign policy, in which the strategic doctrine of containment and deterrence that led us to peaceful victory during the Cold War has been replaced by the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. The president has adopted a policy of “anticipatory self-defense” that is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor on a date which, as an earlier American president said it would, lives in infamy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was right, but today it is we Americans who live in infamy. The global wave of sympathy that engulfed the United States after 9/11 has given way to a global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism. Public opinion polls in friendly countries regard George W. Bush as a greater threat to peace than Saddam Hussein. Demonstrations around the planet, instead of denouncing the vicious rule of the Iraqi president, assail the United States on a daily basis.

The Bush Doctrine converts us into the world’s judge, jury and executioner — a self-appointed status that, however benign our motives, is bound to corrupt our leadership. As John Quincy Adams warned on July 4, 1821, the fundamental maxims of our policy “would insensibly change from liberty to force … [America] might become the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.” Already the collateral damage to our civil liberties and constitutional rights, carried out by the religious fanatic who is our attorney general, is considerable — and more is still to come.

What drove the rush to war? Hussein has a significantly smaller military force than he had in 1990, and he has grown weaker as more weapons have been exposed and destroyed under the United Nations’ inspection regime. The cause of our rush to war was so trivial as to seem idiotic. It was the weather. American troops, our masters tell us, will lose their edge in the Persian Gulf’s midday sun; so we had to go to war before summer. This is a reason to rush to war? We have, after all, a professional army — and a professional army ought not to lose its edge so quickly and easily.

There is a base suspicion that we are going to war against Iraq because that is the only war we can win. We can’t win the war against Al Qaeda because Al Qaeda strikes from the shadows and disappears into them. We can’t win a war against North Korea because it has nuclear weapons. Indeed, the danger from North Korea is far more clear, present and compelling than the danger from Iraq, and our different treatment of the two countries is a potent incentive for other rogue states to develop their own nuclear arsenals.

How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate? No war has been more extensively previewed than this one. Despite pro forma disclaimers, President Bush’s determination to go to war has been apparent from the start. Why then this absence of dialogue? Why the collapse of the Democratic Party? Why let the opposition movement fall into the hands of infantile leftists?

I think the media are greatly to blame. There have been congressional efforts to jump-start a debate. Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia have delivered strong and thoughtful speeches opposing the rush to war. They have been largely ignored by the media. Some philanthropist had to pay the New York Times to print the text of Byrd’s powerful Feb. 12 speech in a full-page advertisement — a speech ignored by the media when delivered. The media have played up mass demonstrations at the expense of the reasoned case against the war.

According to polls, a near majority of ill-informed Americans believes Hussein had something to do with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon and resulting massacre of nearly 3,000 innocent people. Hussein is a great villain, but he had nothing to do with 9/11. Many, perhaps most, Americans believe a war against Iraq will be a blow against international terrorism. But evidence from the region indicates very plainly that it will make recruitment much easier for Al Qaeda and other murderous gangs.

What should we have done? What if opposition to war had received a fair break from the media? There are two strong arguments for the war — that Hussein might down the road acquire nuclear weapons, and that the people of Iraq deserve liberation from his monstrous tyranny.

Unlike biological and chemical weapons, nuclear arms — and their production facilities — are hard to conceal. Inspection, surveillance, tapping telephone calls and espionage could check any nuclear initiative on Hussein’s part. He is containable, and he is not immortal.

The more powerful argument is humanitarian intervention. This comes with ill grace from an administration that includes people who showed no objections to Hussein’s human rights atrocities when he was at war with Iran. But do we have a moral obligation to fight despicable tyrants everywhere?

Hussein is unquestionably a monster. But does that mean we should forcibly remove him from power? “Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled,” Adams said in the same July 4 speech, “there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” We are now going abroad to destroy a monster. The aftermath — how America conducts itself in Iraq and the world — will provide the crucial test as to whether the war can be justified.

America as the world’s self-appointed judge, jury and executioner? “We must face the fact,” President John F. Kennedy once said, “that the United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient — that we are only 6{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the world’s population — that we cannot impose our will upon the other 94{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of mankind — that we cannot right every wrong or reverse each adversity — and that therefore there cannot be an American solution to every world problem.”

TEACH-IN on the IRAQ WAR

Join VETERANS, SCHOLARS, and ACTIVISTS in discussing the causes, implications, and potential consequences of the U.S. War against Iraq–a war that may not only change the face of the Middle East but the geopolitics and security concerns of the entire globe.

Kay Chapel, American University Saturday, March 22, 1-5 pm

Speakers include:

Daniel Ellsberg: Author, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Former Defense Department Official who released the Pentagon Papers

Bobby Muller: President, Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation

Joseph Cirincione: Director, Non-Proliferation Project, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Wayne Smith: Executive Director, The Justice Project; Former President, Black Patriots Memorial Foundation

Susan Shaer: Executive Director, Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND)

Jo Marie Griesgraber, Advocacy Director of Oxfam America

Clovis Maksoud: Professor, School of International Service; Director, American University’s Center for the Global South; Former Arab League Ambassador

Eric Gustafson: Executive Director, Education for Peace in Iraq Center; Gulf War Vet

Peter Kuznick: Professor of History; Director, American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute

John H. Brown: Former State Department Official

Dave Cline: President, Veterans for Peace

John Ketwig: Author, A Hard Rain Fell; Vietman Vet

Jonathan Schell: Nuclear Expert, Author, The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition

Gene R. La Rocque: Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.); President Emeritus, Center for Defense Information

Jamie Raskin: Professor, American University’s Washington College of Law; Author, Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. the American People

Andy Shallal: Iraqi-Americans for Peaceful Alternatives

Salih Booker: Director, Africa Action

Ariela Blatter: Head of Iraq Crisis Response Team, Amnesty International

Eugene Fidell: President, National Institute for Military Justice

Charles Sheehan-Miles: Veterans for Common Sense; Gulf War Vet

Nancy Lessin: Military Families Speak Out

Charlie Richardson: Military Families Speak Out

Karin Lee: Friends Committee on National Legislation

John Kim: Veterans for Peace

Joe Eldridge: American University Chaplain

Barbara Greene: Wesley Seminary Center for Theology and Public Policy

Jamie Vasquez: Veterans for Peace; Vietnam Vet

Sponsored by Veterans Against Iraq War, Veterans for Peace, Veterans for Common Sense, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, American University’s Nuclear Studies Institute, OneWorld U.S., Historians Against the War

Statement of Charles Sheehan-Miles

Executive Director, Nuclear Policy Research Institute and Spokesman for Veterans for Common Sense

Good Afternoon. My name is Charles Sheehan-Miles. I am a Gulf War veteran, Executive Director of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, and I serve on the Board of Directors of Veterans for Common Sense.

I would like to open by offering our condolences to the families of those who have already been killed in action in the second Gulf War. Regardless of whether or not we agree with the policies causing this war, we share your grief for your loved ones and offer our prayers.

During the first Gulf War, I served in combat with 4th Battalion 64th Armor, which is now in combat somewhere in Southern Iraq. I am here to talk about the grave concerns many veterans share about the second Gulf War.

Like our affiliate – the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC) – Veterans for Common Sense (VCS) and Win Without War recognizes that it is not just the fate of one man, but the fate of 24 million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers that hangs in the balance.

Veterans for Common Sense is a patriotic organization of veterans: we support our troops and our veterans 100 percent. However, VCS rejects the Administration’s new “First Strike” doctrine.

American soldiers should protect America, not attack other nations.

VCS is disturbed to note that even as our troops are in combat, the White House and Congress are actively cutting health care and educational funding for those service members, veterans and their children.

Here is what Veterans for Common Sense wants to share with America:

First, Veterans for Common Sense respects America’s long history of building multilateral diplomacy, international agreements and the rule of law.

In the past, America has served as a beacon of freedom and democracy, defending freedom, building international institutions and working to ensure world peace.

The President and this administration have turned a century of multilateral diplomacy upside down: we have weakened the United Nations, damaged relations with our allies and tarnished America’s image in the world.

This war puts hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers at severe risk. Recently one thousand American veterans, including retired senior military officers, wrote the President citing the dramatic risks the Iraqi population faces, including widespread disease, food shortfalls and exposure to severe environmental toxins including depleted uranium and oil well fires. All this in a country of 24 million people, with less than ten thousand medical doctors

Veterans for Common Sense is concerned that a unilateral, first-strike approach to foreign affairs encourages armed conflict around the globe, providing a deadly precedent to other countries which may use military conflict to avoid patient diplomacy. As we have seen with Russia only this week, a first-strike aggressive policy encourages nuclear proliferation and makes the world a much more dangerous place.

As an alternative to the Administration’s national security doctrine, Veterans for Common Sense wants the United States to be engaged in world affairs as a partner with allies and the United Nations.

Even as our troops are in combat, Congress is slashing the Department of Veterans Affairs’ budget. While Americans remained glued to their television sets watching the second Gulf War unfold on TV, the House Budget Committee voted to slash $25 billion from VA’s budget over the next ten years.

The prestigious National Academy of Sciences blasted the Pentagon twice for failing to keep records on Desert Storm veterans’ toxic exposures – including exposure to sarin chemical warfare agents. The Pentagon’s outrageous failure needlessly delayed medical research and treatment for tens of thousands of seriously ill Gulf War veterans for many years. Yet, despite the passage of the Force Health Protection Act, the Pentagon is repeating the same mistakes and not conducting appropriate health surveys of deploying troops.

The Administration’s actions show a loss of respect and loss of concern for American soldiers and veterans and for the civilian population of Iraq. The proposed budget is an outrage that must be stopped. To paraphrase President Abraham Lincoln, America must provide full healthcare and benefits for those who have borne the battle.

Today Veterans for Common Sense, with the Win Without War Coalition, announces our campaign to support the troops with deeds, not words. To the Congress and the President, we ask that you really support the troops: don’t just say it.

Elements of our campaign include:

• Pushing to safeguard the safety and healthcare for the troops and fully fund the Department of Veterans Affairs.

• Direct contact with deployed service members with prayers and messages of support

• Continued education and public awareness of the role combat veterans must play in the national debate over the judicious use of military force.

More information about the campaign is available on our web site at http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org

Thank you. May this war end quickly and our soldiers return home safely.

Veterans for Common Sense

Home

Hot Springs, South Dakota — Not all local opponents of the war against Iraq were publicly protesting on Thursday.

“I support most of those people who do that — we need them — but I’m uncomfortable with it myself,” Hot Springs businessman Redge Dass said.

Dass is wary of being associated with left-wing “fringe groups” that sometimes show up at demonstrations. He also said that now that the war has started, he wants to focus on supporting troops. “I’m 100 percent behind the GIs,” he said. “We need to give them everything they need to finish their mission and get out of there.”

Dass has good reason to be empathetic with soldiers. He served in the U.S. Navy for 11 years, from 1982 to 1993. He and his wife recently moved to Hot Springs, where they have several enterprises — including concert promotion and yoga instruction.

Dass served with Navy Seabees, the famed construction unit, during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Two years earlier, he saw action in Panama during Operation Just Cause.

“In Panama, I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said. “That was a weird environment.”

His small unit was repairing damage at a military “fuel farm” when the operation to oust Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega began. Dass and his fellow engineers and a small group of U.S. Marines were attacked with mortars and small-arms fire.

The Seabees and Marines returned fire and drove the attackers off, although Dass gives most of the credit to the Marines. “They were there to make sure we didn’t hurt ourselves,” he said. “It was over in 20 minutes.”

Dass spent Operation Desert Storm in Saudi Arabia, training other Navy personnel to work more effectively with Marines in combat. “I wasn’t a frontline soldier, but I was sending kids out there,” he said.

Dass supported Desert Storm. He even remembers being disappointed that the coalition didn’t attack Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein. The case against Saddam was clearer back then, he said. “It was cut and dried. He had invaded another sovereign nation. We knew what we were dealing with.”

Dass opposes this second war with Iraq.

“Maybe I’m more geopolitically sophisticated now,” Dass said. “I’m not convinced that Iraq is an overwhelming national-security threat, and I’m not convinced there’s a direct connection between Iraq and al-Qaida.”

He also believes the manner in which the United States went to war was unconstitutional. He doesn’t think the Bush administration is wholly to blame for that, either. “Congress has abdicated its role,” he said.

Dass has joined Veterans for Common Sense, a national group opposed to the Iraq war, but for the most part he has remained on the sidelines of protests. Still, he is angered by supporters of U.S. policy who call the protesters and other war opponents “unpatriotic.”

“I do resent that,” he said. “I’m a military veteran and a combat veteran. I have a right to speak out.”

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com

Herald Correspondent Lindsay Murdoch, travelling with a Marines artillery unit, reports on one of the war’s first battles on the Iraq-Kuwait border.

There was little initial resistance as the United States Marines swept into southern Iraq early yesterday. One of the first encounters of the ground war was more like a massacre than a fight.

The Iraqi gunners fired first, soon after United States President George Bush announced the attack on Saddam Hussein was under way.

It was a fatal mistake.

The Iraqi artillery unit, preparing for the American invasion, had tested the range by firing registering shots at a likely spot where the American tanks would cross from Kuwait. US radar picked up the incoming shells and pinpointed their source.

Within hours, the Iraqi gunners and their Russian-made 122mm howitzers were destroyed as the Americans unleashed an artillery barrage that shook the ground and lit up the night sky with orange flashes.

“Dead bodies are everywhere,” a US officer reported by radio.

Later in the day, the American firepower was turned on Safwan Hill, an Iraqi military observation post a couple of kilometres across the border. About six hours after US marines and their 155mm howitzer guns pulled up at the border, they opened up with a deafening barrage. Safwan Hill went up in a huge fireball and the Iraqi observation post was obliterated.

“I pity anybody who’s in there,” a marine sergeant said. “We told them to surrender.”

The destruction of Safwan Hill was a priority for the attacking forces because it had sophisticated surveillance equipment near the main highway that runs from Kuwait up to Basra and then Baghdad. The attacking US and British forces could not attempt to cross the border unless it was destroyed.

Marine Cobra helicopter gunships firing Hellfire missiles swept in low from the south. Then the marine howitzers, with a range of 30 kilometres, opened a sustained barrage over the next eight hours. They were supported by US Navy aircraft which dropped 40,000 pounds of explosives and napalm, a US officer told the Herald.

A legal expert at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said the use of napalm or fuel air bombs was not illegal “per se” because the US was not a signatory to the 1980 weapons convention which prohibits and restricts certain weapons. “But the US has to apply the basic principles of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and take all precautions to protect civilians. In the case of napalm and fuel air bombs, these are special precautions because these are area weapons, not specific weapons,” said Dominique Loye, the committee’s adviser on weapons and IHL.

When dawn broke on Safwan Hill, all that could be seen on top of it was a single antenna amid the smoke. The marines then moved forward, their officers saying they were determined to push on as quickly as possible for Baghdad.

The first air strike on Baghdad, and Mr Bush’s announcement that the war was under way, appeared to catch US officers in the Kuwait desert by surprise.

The attack was originally planned for early today. But the US officers did not seem worried.

Within hours of Mr Bush’s announcement, a vast army of tanks, trucks, bulldozers and heavy guns was surging through the dust of the Kuwaiti desert to positions on Iraq’s border.

“We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.”

— U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, Aug. 12, 1945.

Will Bush be impeached? Will he be called a war criminal? These are not hyperbolic questions. Mr. Bush has permitted a small cadre of neoconservatives to isolate him from world opinion, putting him at odds with the United Nations and America’s allies.

What better illustrates Mr. Bush’s isolation than the fact that he delivered his March 16 ultimatum to the U.N. concerning Iraq from an air base in the Azores, where there was no prospect for massive demonstrations against his policy. Standing with Mr. Bush against the world were Britain and Spain.

The U.S., once a guarantor of peace, is now perceived in the rest of the world as an aggressor. Its victim is a small Muslim nation unable to defend its own air space, much less to project power beyond its borders. If Iraqis attempt to resist invasion, they will be slaughtered.

On the eve of Mr. Bush’s ultimatum, it came to light that a key piece of evidence used by the Bush administration to link Iraq to a nuclear weapons program is a forgery. Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has asked the FBI to investigate the origin of the forged documents that the Bush administration used to make its case that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction.

Secretary of State Colin Powell denies that the Bush administration created the phony documents. “It came from other sources,” Mr. Powell told Congress, but he could not identify the source.

As George Santayana said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.” The administration’s use of forged evidence opens Mr. Bush to unflattering comparisons that his enemies will not hesitate to make. They will point out that it was Adolf Hitler’s strategy to fabricate evidence in order to justify his invasion of a helpless country. He used S.S. troops dressed in Polish uniforms to fake an attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz on Aug. 31, 1939. Following the faked attack, Hitler announced: “This night for the first time Polish regular soldiers fired on our own territory.” As German troops poured into Poland, Hitler declared: “The Polish state has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and has appealed to arms.” The German High Command called the German invasion of Poland a “counterattack.”

Thanks to his neoconservative cadre, outside the U.S. Mr. Bush is now a disliked and distrusted politician. Mr. Bush’s enemies will exploit parallels to “naked aggression.” After many decades of U.S. leadership in building an “international order,” Mr. Bush’s enemies will hold him accountable for his defiance of this order.

As much as those of us who prefer national sovereignty to world government lament the fact, the many decades of appealing to “world opinion” and enlisting it in behalf of our foreign policies has resulted in considerable authority being poured into that nebulous concept. In setting Mr. Bush in opposition to this American creation, neoconservatives have exposed him to serious charges. Democrats, who intended to use allegations about the 2000 Florida vote to destroy Mr. Bush’s presidency as illegitimate, now have more deadly ammunition.

Mr. Rockefeller will not be the only one to ask if the forged nuclear documents are part of a Bush administration campaign to deceive the public. Polls show that 50 percent of Americans believe it was Iraqis who hijacked the airplanes and crashed them into the World Trade Towers and Pentagon. Inattention or media incompetence are the likely explanations for this extraordinary misinformation, but some will now blame deception.

Others are already thinking the forged documents are part of a neoconservative campaign to deceive President Bush and win his support for their Middle Eastern policy.

Many perceive Mr. Bush as following a reckless path, one that politicians normally try to avoid at all costs. If Iraq resists and devastating new explosives, which our military has been testing at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, are dropped on Baghdad, there will be massive civilian deaths and charges of war crimes fueled by anger at American arrogance.

Mr. Bush and his advisers have forgotten that the power of an American president is temporary and relative. The U.S. is supposed to be the world’s leader. For the Bush administration to pursue a policy that sets the U.S. government at odds with the world is to invite comparisons with recklessness that we have not seen in international politics since Nikita Khrushchev tried to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. Is Saddam Hussein worth this much grief?

Washington – With hundreds of thousands of American troops poised for combat in Iraq, veterans groups are criticizing a budget plan expected on the House floor this week that would slash Veterans Affairs money by $15 billion in the next decade to help make room for President Bush’s proposed tax cuts.

“Cutting already underfunded veterans’ programs to offset the costs of tax cuts is indefensible and callous,” said Edward R. Heath, national commander of the Disabled American Veterans. “It is unconscionable to cut benefits and services for disabled veterans at a time when we have thousands of our service members in harm’s way.”

The Republican plan, which the House Budget Committee adopted last week on a party-line vote, would chop $467 billion – 1 percent – from mandatory spending programs including the Veterans Affairs Department, Medicare and Medicaid in the next 10 years to offset $1.5 trillion in tax cuts the president proposes in the same period. The proposal also contains major increases in spending for defense programs and homeland security while achieving a balanced federal budget by 2010.

The VA cuts would take place in disability compensation, education benefits, pensions and health care, according to veterans advocacy groups.
When the Budget Committee adopted the budget blueprint last week, committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, said priorities were focused on defense, homeland security and the president’s economic growth plan.

“We are in a time of war, and the No. 1 task before us is protecting Americans,” he said. “I am absolutely committed to providing our men and women in uniform with the resources they need to do their jobs effectively and safely as possible.”

Ronald F. Conley, national commander of the American Legion, argued that veterans’ pensions and disability compensation are part of the costs of using the U.S. military to carry out national policies. The House’s proposed budget “defies common sense,” he said.

“Our nation cannot, in good conscience, commit men and women to battle and reduce the meager, yet well-deserved, compensation for those who are wounded,” Conley said.

A Senate budget plan, also adopted in committee last week, doesn’t call for the cuts but produces a balanced budget in 2013 by using some unrealistic assumptions on spending levels.

Already in the House, leaders are scrambling to find votes for the budget plan after 11 moderate Republicans said they would not vote for it.

Ray Sisk, commander in chief of Veterans of Foreign Wars, said cutting the VA budget even 1 percent would worsen many of the agency’s problems such as a backlog of 200,000 veterans waiting more than six months to see a doctor.

“We cannot expect sick and disabled veterans to wait months for earned health care,” he said. “Equally troubling is that further cuts in funding would cause VA to curb further enrollment or to remove certain veterans from the health-care system altogether.”

The crash of the CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter killed 12 U.S. and 4 British soldiers, officials said.

U.S. military officials said they did not have further details about the crash.

Military officials said they did not know if the helicopter had been hit by hostile fire or crashed for some other reason.

The Marines use the Sea Knight, a bus-like helicopter with two large rotors, to fly troops from ships at sea or base camps to forward positions.

The Navy and Marines grounded all 291 Sea Knight helicopters in August after an inspection of one helicopter in North Carolina found a crack in a rotor assembly. A Marine Corps CH-46 crashed in 2001, killing three Marines and injuring two.