Veterans for Common Sense

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.

Iraq will be invaded or occupied regardless of “ultimatum,” report says

George W. Bush’s March 17 speech has been boiled down to one blunt statement: “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours.

Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.”

Headlines the next morning focused on this message: “President Tells Hussein to Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours or Face Invasion” (Washington Post);
“Bush Gives Ultimatum to Hussein: Leave in 48 Hours or Face War” (Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel); “President Gives the Iraqi Dictator One Last Deadline” (San Antonio Express-News).

One story, however, at the bottom of an inside page in the New York Times, had a different message: “Allies Will Move In, Even if Saddam Hussein Moves Out” was the headline over a page A16 story by Times military
correspondent Michael Gordon. “Even if Saddam Hussein leaves Iraq within 48 hours, as President Bush demanded, allied forces plan to move north into Iraqi territory, American officials said today,” the article began.

Gordon pointed to a little-noted line in Bush’s speech: “It is not too late for the Iraqi military to act with honor and protect your country by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction.” While in the context of the speech, this seemed torefer to what Bush hoped Iraqi commanders would do in the event that his
ultimatum was rejected, Gordon reports that this was actually a signal that regardless of what Hussein chooses, the U.S. would still, in Gordon’s
words, “enter Iraq to search for hidden weapons of mass destruction and help stabilize the nation so that a new and more democratic regime could take over.”

Even if the Iraqi military were to overthrow Hussein, Gordon wrote, “a military intervention seems very likely.” He quoted Colin Powell’s statement on March 17 to the effect that “the only way for Iraq to avoid
an attack is for Mr. Hussein to leave the country and ‘allow this matter to be resolved through the peaceful entry of force.'”

In other words, there is nothing that Iraq can do to avoid invasion and occupation; its only choice is whether or not to surrender. Why dress up this straightforward policy with a claim that Saddam Hussein’s refusal to step down within a 48-hour deadline “will result in military conflict”?
Presumably because the White House knew that the media would find the drama of the ultimatum irresistible, and would therefore frame the upcoming war not as a choice that Washington was making, but as a final test for Saddam Hussein.

Media have by and large failed to challenge this spin campaign, and continue to frame the story as a “defiant” Saddam Hussein spurning the last chance for peace. “Saddam Sneers Back: Hell No, I Won’t Go” was the New York Daily News’ front-page headline on March 19. The cable news channel MSNBC actually had a “DEADLINE” clock in the lower-right hand corner of its screen at all times, ticking away the seconds until the meaningless deadline passes.

Even the Times itself did not seem to have grasped its own correspondent’s report: “War Imminent as Hussein Rejects Ultimatum” was the paper’s lead headline (3/19/03), with an accompanying story beginning,
“The White House said today that Saddam Hussein was making his ‘final mistake’ by rejecting an ultimatum ordering him to leave Iraq or face war.”

fair@fair.org

When Bush proclaimed that “The Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” that was a lie. What are the “most lethal weapons ever devised?” Why, nuclear weapons, of course.

That Iraq possesses nukes, or is even close to making them, is something for which Bush has been unable to provide any evidence that would withstand scrutiny. The United Nations’ inspectors have found none. And that which the administration has produced turned out to be fraudulent — like the centerpiece documents about Nigerian uranium shipments to Iraq, which were cheap forgeries.

Bush asserted that Iraq “has aided, trained, and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda.” The last part of that was a lie. Pieces of the crucial document of U.S. “proof” that Saddam Hussein has aided his ideological enemy Al Qaeda — a cut-and-paste British report assembled by Tony Blair’s public relations strategist, and recommended heartily as the fundament for this assertion by Colin Powell in his prosecutor’s brief at the United Nations — turned out to have been plagiarized from a paper by a graduate student, based on data a decade old, and augmented by more plagiarizing from press cuttings.

Senior officials of both the British and U.S. intelligence services have told the press of their convictions that assertions of a Saddam/Al Qaeda connection are errant nonsense. For example, a British Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) report — leaked to newspapers in the wake of Powell’s speech by senior spooks appalled at the way their work was being distorted by their political masters — concluded there were no such links, and added that “We believe that Bin Laden views the Ba’ath as an apostate regime; his aim of restoration of an Islamic caliphate, whose capital was Baghdad, is in ideological conflict with present-day Iraq.”

In a reflection of the chimerical nature of Bush’s “proofs,” his speech did not even mention 9/11. And the day before the president spoke, the Baltimore Sun published a lengthy report showing that Bush’s obsession with toppling Saddam preceded 9/11 by nearly a year: at the very first meeting of his National Security Council, the Sun reported (on testimony from participants) that Bush ordered plans to be drawn up “for both clandestine and military action to topple the regime.”

Saddam has, of course, sent money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers; but so has our “ally” Saudi Arabia — and we’re not making war on the House of Saud.

Bush’s assertion in the speech that, when we bring “democracy” to Iraq at gunpoint, this “will set an example to all the Middle East” has been proclaimed as “not credible” in a secret State Department report (“Iraq, the Middle East, and Change: No Dominoes”) leaked to the Los Angeles Times and published on March 14. The report noted that “Electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements.” Where democratic elections have been tried in the region‘s Muslim countries, the results have been victories for Islamist parties in Algeria (a result abrogated by a military coup) and in Turkey, and a strong showing by Islamists in Morocco.

This is not an argument against democracy, but a reminder that international politics is not checkers, but chess: one has to think eight or 10 moves ahead. Bush is no chess-player. His war on Iraq is a gift to the Bin Ladens of this world and to the extremist theocrats; it will fuel the fiery preachments of the Islamist mullahs, facilitating recruitment by Islamist parties everywhere, and creating a climate in which the creation of new generations of terrorists will take a quantum leap.

“War criminals will be punished,” Bush intoned, “and it will be no defense to say I was just following orders.” This from a president who, in his first year in office, used the U.S. veto power at the United Nations to reject the International Criminal Court set up to prosecute war crimes (while asserting the U.S. military’s right to be exempt from prosecution under international law).

Bush tried to blame France for causing the war by threatening to use its veto. What hypocrisy: since the United Nations creation, the United States has used its veto 76 times, and 41 of those vetoes in the last three decades concerned attempts by the United Nations to call Israel to account for its violations of multiple U.N. resolutions. Not just the Muslim world but many outside it find this record shockingly one-sided.

By asserting the United States’ right to invade whomever it likes whenever it likes, Bush’s speech brought the world to the most dangerous moment in its history since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. A first-strike on Iraq, unprovoked by any aggressive act on Saddam’s part, will start a new nuclear arms race by countries that have nothing further to lose by creating a nuclear deterrent to the unchecked imperial power of Washington.

A first-strike on Iraq turns the United States into an aggressive power as a matter of policy, shreds the fragile framework of nascent international law and takes the global diplomacy back 70 years by making the United Nations as irrelevant as the League of Nations was in its ability to stop aggression.

Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, who was this country’s representative to the International Conference on Military Trials in August 1945 and the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, told his colleagues then that “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.”

Bush’s Monday speech definitively threw that American principle into the trashcan of history. And that is ultimately more dangerous on a planetary scale than any depradation which Saddam has the means to accomplish.

Here are the most important sections from Rep. Waxman’s letter to President Bush:

“It appears that at the same time that you, Secretary Rumsfeld, and State Department officials were citing Iraq’s efforts to obtain uranium from Africa as a crucial part of the case against Iraq, U.S. intelligence sources regarded this very same evidence as unreliable.”

“If true, this is deeply disturbing: it would mean that your Administration asked the U.N. Security Council, the Congress, and the American people to rely on information your own experts knew was not credible.”

Please click on the link above to read the entire text of Rep. Waxman’s letter. He raises many important points ignored by the press. Because the press isn’t reporting the faked information used by Bush to start a war, the people aren’t aware of the critical facts.

Veterans for Common Sense will continue to raise questions about the causes and courses of the impending Second Gulf War.

If another war starts, VCS will continue to support our troops and our democracy 100{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} by providing a forum for all Americans to learn more about the Gulf War.

Washington – A congressional subcommittee on veterans issues will hold a hearing this month on whether troops are being medically screened, as required by law, before being sent overseas.

Congress required the military in 1997 to ensure that troops receive medical examinations, including tests of their blood and mental health, before deployment and after they return.

The law grew out of concern about unexplained illnesses that followed the 1991 Gulf War. The medical tests required by the law were intended to establish a medical baseline that could provide clues in case the phenomenon, known as Gulf War syndrome, should recur.

The Kansas City Star reported last week that troops being deployed to the Persian Gulf were receiving only a brief health questionnaire with general questions.

Michael Kilpatrick, a top Pentagon health official, said the military thought it was following the intent of the law.

Sen. John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat active on veterans issues, has asked the General Accounting Office to investigate whether the Pentagon is doing so.

The March 25 hearing will be conducted by the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations of the House Committee on Government Reform.

Lawrence Halloran, the subcommittee’s staff director and chief counsel, said the unexplained health problems experienced by many veterans of the Gulf War weren’t “just stress.”

The hearing, he said, will try to determine whether troops are getting the necessary medical tests and whether records are being kept in case similar problems arise should a second Gulf War occur.

“That’s a lesson that should have been learned,” Halloran said. “We missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We shouldn’t miss it again.”

The hearing will also serve as a follow-up on the subcommittee’s investigation two years ago into the military’s readiness to fight future wars, he said.

To reach David Goldstein, Washington correspondent, call (202) 383-6105, or send email to dgoldstein@krwashington.com

…International “inspectors have found no evidence that Saddam has revived its nuclear weapons program.”

Washington (AP) – The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Friday to investigate forged documents the Bush administration used as evidence against Saddam Hussein and his military ambitions in Iraq.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia said he was uneasy about a possible campaign to deceive the public about the status of Iraq’s nuclear program.

An investigation should “at a minimum help to allay any concerns” that the government was involved in the creation of the documents to build support for administration policies, Rockefeller wrote in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has denied the U.S. government had any hand in creating the false documents.

“It came from other sources,” Powell told a House committee Thursday. “We were aware of this piece of evidence, and it was provided in good faith to the inspectors.”

Rockefeller asked the FBI to determine the source of the documents, the sophistication of the forgeries, the motivation of those responsible, why intelligence agencies didn’t recognize them as forgeries and whether they are part of a larger disinformation campaign.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The documents indicated that Iraq tried to by uranium from Niger, the West African nation that is the third-largest producer of mined uranium, Niger’s largest export. The documents had been provided to U.S. officials by a third country, which has not been identified.

A U.S. government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was unclear who first created the documents. The official said American suspicions remain about an Iraq-Niger uranium connection because of other, still-credible evidence that the official refused to specify.

In December, the State Department used the information to support its case that Iraq was lying about its weapons programs. But on March 7, Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the U.N. Security Council that the documents were forgeries.

Rockefeller said U.S. worries about Iraqi nuclear weapons were not based primarily on the documents, but “there is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”

At a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing Thursday, Powell said the State Department had not participated “any way in any falsification.”

Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the committee’s top Democrat, noted a Washington Post report that said a foreign government might have been conducting a deception campaign to win support for military action against Iraq. When Obey asked Powell if he could say which country that was, Powell replied, “I can’t with confidence.”

The Niger documents marked the second time that ElBaradei has challenged evidence presented by the United States meant to illustrate Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. He also rejected the U.S. position that aluminum tubes imported by Iraq were intended to make nuclear bombs.

ElBaradei has said his inspectors have found no evidence that Saddam has revived its nuclear weapons program.

Captain Hamilton, 30, of Houston, who has never experienced war, apologized briefly at the outset for the subject matter and then matter-of-factly presented the battalion’s plan for casualties.

The battalion has ordered small bags for the men to carry to collect a dead marine’s personal effects. “If we don’t get those, everybody’s carrying zip-locks,” the officer said.

Each man should carry his personal items in the cargo pocket of his trousers, which will be cut open and quickly emptied if he is killed. Two dog tags, one around the neck and one in a boot. Four dead marines are considered a mass casualty, with its own mortality team. Chemical attack casualties (“dirty” corpses) bring yet another team.

Dead Iraqis are to be searched for military items, like maps. “No trophies or anything like that,” Captain Hamilton said. If the marines must bury them, they are to do so with their heads pointing southwest, toward Mecca. “Some of this is just Geneva Convention, and some of this is just common sense and doing the right thing,” Captain Hamilton said.

While the world awaits another United Nations deadline for Iraq to disarm, the marines of Task Force Tarawa are waiting for word from their commander in chief to get rolling. On Wednesday another set of officers gathered around a flag-size map, duct taped to plywood and planned, to the minute, the first few days after an H-hour that has not come.

One officer in charge of sorting intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency, satellites and Kuwaiti spies stood and with a pointer tapped the map where sources had reported Iraqis building sandbag bunkers beside highways.

Another officer indicated a 1-kilometer square on the map, close to the Iraqi border, and reported a recent sighting: “A guy on a motorcycle stopped and buried something,” he said, pointing. Little pieces of red tape indicate troop positions, either with vehicles or merely knots of soldiers (“straight legs”). There are extensive plans for handling prisoners as well as accepting troops that drop their arms and denounce Saddam Hussein.

The task force is named for Tarawa, a Pacific island that was the site of a bloody World War II battle, and the battalion is made up of a patchwork of East Coast units. It takes half an hour to jog the perimeter of this flat town of canvas and parked steel, where 4,000 marines sleep 10 to a tent on cots or plywood or on the sand. There are rows of trucks capable of dragging seven tons through the sand, tanks, 16,000-pound Howitzer cannons and crates of ammunition.

The wait is grueling for the troops. There is an uncomfortable difference between being ready and staying ready.

On Wednesday more than 500 marines from the artillery battalions assembled at 7 a.m. and ran the perimeter, more for something to do than for the benefit of the workout. Even at that relatively cool hour, a handful of marines fell out of formation, dehydrated. Winter is ending.

“Get your letters written, make sure your body’s ready to move out, your gear’s ready to move out and your buddy’s ready to move out,” Lt. Col. Glenn Starnes, the commanding officer here, told the troops panting after the run.

Then, he said, in so many words, let’s go get Saddam.

The men cheered, then returned to their tents to sit around.

Mechanics perform constant preventive maintenance on the artillery, wiping sand from the Howitzer sights. The men practice donning protective gear in the event of a chemical attack.

At the call of “Gas! Gas! Gas!” they rip masks from pouches strapped to their thighs and pull them over their heads before taking their next breath. They have tied the hoods of their ponchos into little knots, to drape the plastic over their bodies if there is not time to climb into protective suits.

Malaria pills are to be distributed 48 hours before H-hour, for duty in the marshy swamps near the Euphrates River. “They dump pollution right into the river,” a young doctor told the meeting. “Their rivers are nasty. If you get wet, expect to get diarrhea. If you eat local food, expect to get diarrhea.”

The officers planning a possible attack have already established the order of the vehicles as they cross the border and where they will stop to refuel.

But then the “Voice of America” came on the radio after lunch, with the seemingly daily announcements of possible extensions to the Monday deadline set by the United Nations for Iraq to disarm. Officers sprawled on cots shouted curses.

“I don’t even want to talk about it,” said Lt. Matt Neely, pulling a stool and a crossword puzzle from an old copy of The Stars and Stripes out into the sun. “That’s the worst thing in the world any of us can hear right now.”

The marines take pride in living less comfortably than the soldiers, sailors and pilots assembling in the Middle East. They are allowed shower time only once every four days. They use portable toilets and water from tanks, washing their laundry with powdered detergent in metal buckets. There are no telephones to call home, and mail arrives sporadically. Some smoke cigarettes; more use chewing tobacco, spitting into empty water bottles. They drink water all day but try to stop by 6 p.m., so they do not have to get up in the night.

Most marines have begun wearing bulletproof vests and helmets to get used to the added weight. They plan to travel even lighter than they arrived, leaving behind narrow cots and other personal effects in big storage containers.

Lieutenant Neely, 25, is like many marines in Task Force Tarawa. He got the call on New Year’s Eve, on his cell phone on the way to a party with his girlfriend in North Carolina.

“She was like, `What was that phone call?’ Even though she knew the answer,” he said.

Lt. Josh Cusworth, 28, from Richland, N.C., was at home that same day when his phone rang. He was granted permission to fly to California four days later for his long-planned wedding but was told to hurry back.

“I was having a good time, but it was going to end in a few days,” he recalled. “I got home and started packing.”

They made the trip overseas on seven ships, arriving a month later in mid-February. During the voyage they received inoculations for smallpox and anthrax.

Six of the ships are still in the region, which gives some hope.

“The quicker it gets started, the quicker it’s all over,” Lieutenant Neely said.

As American and British troops prepare to invade Iraq, public opinion in these countries does not support war without U.N. authorization. The rest of the world is overwhelmingly opposed to war.

Yet Saddam Hussein is regarded as a tyrant who needs to be disarmed, and the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1441 which demanded that Saddam destroy his weapons of mass destruction. What caused this disconnect?

Iraq is the first instance when the Bush doctrine is being applied and it is provoking an allergic reaction. The Bush doctrine is built on two pillars: (1) The United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy; and (2) the United States arrogates the right to preemptive action.

These pillars support two classes of sovereignty: American sovereignty, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations, and the sovereignty of all other states. This is reminiscent of George Orwell’s Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated starkly; it is buried in Orwellian doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because the doctrine contradicts American values.

The Bush administration believes that international relations are relations of power; legality and legitimacy are mere decorations. This belief is not false, but it exaggerates one aspect of reality to the exclusion of others. The aspect it stresses is military power. But no empire could ever be held together by military power alone.

Yet that belief guides the Bush administration. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel shares the same belief and look where that has led. The idea that might is right cannot be reconciled with the idea of an open society. Hence the need for Orwellian doublespeak.

But nobody is in possession of the ultimate truth. Those who make such claims are bound to be wrong at times, and so can enforce their claims only by coercion and repression. Bush makes no allowance for the possibility that he may be wrong, and he tolerates no dissent. If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists, he proclaims.

Of course, the presence of extremist views in the executive branch does not make America a totalitarian state. The principles of open society are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the institutions of American democracy are protected by the Constitution. There are checks and balances, and the President must obtain the support of the people. Nevertheless, the Bush doctrine could do untold harm before it is abandoned – as eventually it will be.

I see parallels between the Bush administration’s pursuit of American supremacy and a boom-bust process or bubble in the stock market. Bubbles do not arise out of thin air. They have a solid basis in reality, but misconception distorts reality. Here, the dominant position of the United States is the reality, the pursuit of American supremacy the misconception.

For a while, reality reinforces the misconception, but eventually the gap between reality and its false interpretation becomes unsustainable. During the self-reinforcing phase, the misconception may be tested, and when a test is successful the misconception is reinforced. This widens the gap, leading to an eventual reversal. The later it comes, the more devastating the consequences.

There seems to be an inexorable quality about this, but a boom-bust process can be aborted at any stage. Most stock market booms are aborted long before the extremes reached by the recent bull market. The sooner this happens, the better. That is how I view the Bush administration’s pursuit of American supremacy.

The Bush administration came into office with an ideology based on market fundamentalism and military supremacy. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, it could not make much headway in implementing its ideology because it lacked a clear mandate and defined enemy. Terrorism provided the ideal enemy because it is invisible and never disappears. By declaring war on terrorism, President Bush gained the domestic mandate he lacked.

But his policies have already caused severe unintended consequences. The EU and NATO are divided. The United States is perceived as a giant bully throwing its weight around. Afghanistan has been liberated, but law and order has not been established beyond Kabul. Indeed, President Karzai must be protected by American bodyguards. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict festers.

Beyond Iraq an even more dangerous threat looms in North Korea – a crisis precipitated by President Bush in his eagerness to break with what he deemed to be Clinton’s appeasement. Bush repudiated the “sunshine policy” introduced by President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea and included North Korea in the axis of evil.

Rapid victory in Iraq with little loss of life could bring about a dramatic change in the overall situation. Oil prices could fall, stock markets could celebrate, consumers could resume spending, and business could step up capital expenditures. America would end its dependency on Saudi oil, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could become more tractable, and negotiations could start with North Korea without loss of face. That is what Bush counts on.

But military victory in Iraq is the easy part. It is what comes after that gives pause. In a boom-bust process, passing an early test tends to reinforce the misconception which gave rise to it. That is to be feared here.

It is not too late to prevent the boom-bust process from getting out of hand. The U.N. could accede to chief weapons inspector Hans Blix’s request for several months to complete his inspections. America’s military presence in the region could be reduced, but it could be beefed up again if Iraq balks. Invasion could take place at summer’s end. This would be a victory for the U.N. and for the United States whose prodding made the Security Council act resolutely. That is what the French propose, but that is not what is going to happen. President Bush has practically declared war.

It is to be hoped that Iraq’s conquest will be swift and relatively painless. Removing Saddam is a good thing; yet the way President Bush is going about it must be opposed. In the long run, an open society cannot survive unless the people who live in it believe in it.

MEDIA ALERT & INTERVIEW OPPORTUNITIES – 3/11/03
Source: Veterans for Common Sense
Contact: Stephen Kent, Kent Communications
845-758-0097, cell 914-589-5988

In a letter delivered yesterday to President Bush, U.S. war veterans questioned the wisdom of invading Iraq now and sought a meeting with the White House to discuss their concerns. Initiated by the Washington-based veterans’ group Veterans for Common Sense, the letter was e-mailed to veterans this weekend and quickly gathered nearly 1,000 signatories, including high-ranking officers and Kris Kristofferson.

The letter (see below) “strongly question[s] the need for war at this time,” noting signatories are “not convinced that coercive containment has failed, or that war has become necessary.” It argues that unlike 1991’s desert campaign to liberate Kuwait, invading Iraq now would likely entail “protracted siege warfare, chaotic street-to-street fighting in Baghdad, and Iraqi civil conflict,” raising fears of “casualties not witnessed since Vietnam.”

Citing UN predictions of massive Iraqi casualties, including 1.26 million children under age five at particular risk, it states “excessive civilian casualties like those predicted by the UN pose a grave risk to our national security, making the U.S. more of a target of retaliatory attacks by terrorists.” Its signatories describe themselves as “patriotic citizens and veterans who respect the office of the President,” requesting a meeting at his “earliest possible convenience.”

The following signatories are available now for media interviews:

* Specialist Erik K. Gustafson, Gulf War Army veteran, co-founder, Veterans for Common Sense, an organization started by Gulf War veterans questioning the wisdom of invading Iraq.
* Captain Kris Kristofferson, former 82 Airborne helicopter pilot, celebrated actor, Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter.
* Colonel David H. Hackworth, Army veteran of 30 years, and a veteran war correspondent who covered the Gulf War.
* Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, former commander of the U.S. Second Fleet, former director, Center for Defense Information.
* Specialist Charles Sheehan-Miles, Gulf War Army veteran and co-founder, Veterans for Common Sense
* Lt. Colonel Gretchen Vanek, a veteran of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars.
* Colonel Larry Williams, served 27 years in Marine Corps including in Vietnam and Beirut.
* Vice Admiral Ralph Weymouth, Veteran of WWII, Korea and Vietnam.

These and other veteran signatories are available for interviews starting March 11. They are based in major cities, including Washington DC. For more information or to request interviews, contact Stephen Kent, 845-758-0097.