Iraq and Vietnam
Recent observations on the US position in Iraq
Retired General Barry McCaffrey in The Army Times, November 16, 2006:
McCaffrey predicted that the Army, particularly the National Guard, is on the verge of breaking because the effort is vastly under-resourced and cannot be sustained for long.
“You’ve got a foreign policy, a national security policy in Washington and they’re not resourced to carry it out,” said McCaffrey, who called for an increase of 80,000 soldiers and 25,000 Marines in each service. “The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. So we are asking our military to sustain a level of effort that we have not resourced,” he told Army Times.
“That’s how to break the Army is to keep it deployed above the rate at which it can be sustained,” he said. “There’s no free lunch here. The Army and the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command are too small and badly resourced to carry out this national security strategy.”
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Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president’s conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq, creating democracy there, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, making Israel more secure, not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain, and others.
But reality no longer can be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq.
These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can’t be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.
The administration could recognize that a rapid withdrawal is the only way to overcome our strategic paralysis, although that appears unlikely. Congress could force a stock-taking. Failing this, the public, sooner or later, will see through all of the White House’s double talk and compel a radical policy change. The price for delay, however, will be more lives lost in vain.
Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly notes, November 20, 2006:
YES, THINGS CAN GET WORSE….After running through all the options available to us in Iraq and acknowledging that they have little chance of succeeding, Suzanne Nossel briefly raises a point that gets nowhere near enough attention:
9. If we don’t begin a planned exit, there’s a good chance we’ll find ourselves in an unplanned one — It’s surprising that by now we haven’t experienced the Iraqi equivalent of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the dragging of a corpse of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu a decade later. But it seems likely that that day will come.
Conventional wisdom tacitly assumes that the worst that can happen in Iraq is a continuation of the current low-level civil war, resulting in the loss of thousands of Iraqi lives and dozens of U.S. soldiers each month. But as bad as that is, it’s worth keeping in mind that the American occupation has actually made the Iraqi situation worse every single year since it began, and will probably continue to make things worse as long as we’re there.
John Kerry in a speech given in Faneuil Hall on April 22, 2006:
The War in Vietnam and the War in Iraq are now converging in too many tragic respects.
As in Vietnam, we engaged militarily in Iraq based on official deception.
As in Vietnam, we went into Iraq ostensibly to fight a larger global war under the misperception that the particular theater was just a sideshow, but we soon learned that the particular aspects of the place where we fought mattered more than anything else.
And as in Vietnam, we have stayed and fought and died even though it is time for us to go.
We are now in the third war in Iraq in as many years. The first was against Saddam Hussein and his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The second was against terrorists whom, the administration said, it was better to fight over there than here. Now we find our troops in the middle of an escalating civil war.
Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America’s leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion. We want democracy in Iraq, but Iraqis must want it as much as we do. Our valiant soldiers can’t bring democracy to Iraq if Iraq’s leaders are unwilling themselves to make the compromises that democracy requires.
As our generals have said, the war cannot be won militarily. It must be won politically. No American soldier should be sacrificed because Iraqi politicians refuse to resolve their ethnic and political differences.
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Thanks for posting, Dick. For me, JK always has been and always will be the leading moral voice on Iraq.
A must watch documentary is on the Sundance Channel tonight at 9 p.m. est.
WINTER SOLDIER
“And as in Vietnam, we have stayed and fought and died even though it is time for us to go.”
To me, this is the simplest and most powerful statement in the speech. On the page, it’ll make you think. But hearing it spoken by someone who has lived it and is seeing the tragedy replayed is heartrending.
As many times as I’ve heard this speech, those words, spoken by someone who knows, first hand, the awful cost of an unnecessary war, still stop me in my tracks.
Posted by fedup | November 20, 2006 7:47 PM
Thanks fedup - I just checked and, on the west coast, The Winter Soldier will air at 9 pm PST.
Please run for President John Kerry.
We will win this time!!!
This story is getting to me:
Aguayo v. the Secretary of the Army: The first military conscientious objector case to come before the powerful and influential D.C. Circuit Court in the 35 years since the Vietnam War. U.S. Combat Medic Facing Up to Seven Years Military Prison For Refusing a Second Deployment to Iraq Could Be Freed by U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C.
[snip]
Washington, DC: Army Specialist Agustin Aguayo, age 34 – a Mexican-born, naturalized U.S. citizen from Los Angeles and a decorated Iraq War veteran – is facing a sentence up to seven years in military prison for refusing to deploy to Iraq for a second time. His refusal to deploy, at the beginning of September, 2006, followed a more than two-year struggle to get the Army to grant him an immediate honorable discharge on the grounds that he is a conscientious objector (CO). In 2005, he decided to challenge the Army’s denial of his application in a civil court – the federal U.S. District in Washington, D.C., which has jurisdiction over all U.S. military personnel stationed outside the U.S.
On November 21st, 2006, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will consider Agustin’s appeal in his civil court case, Aguayo vs. The Secretary of the Army, and decide upon the merit of his claim that the Army wrongfully denied his 2004 application to be recognized as a CO. The three judges hearing the appeal are: Douglas H. Ginsburg (Chief Judge), David R. Sentelle, and A. Raymond Randloph. This is the first military conscientious objector case to come before the powerful and influential D.C. Circuit Court since 1971, during the Vietnam War. Decisions on appeal are often issued only after several months, but the judges could also rule immediately from the bench to free Aguayo.
Aguayo, who is a combat medic with the 1st Infantry Division, enlisted in the Army prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He was initially assigned to the Schweinfurt Army base in Germany. In February, 2004, at the beginning of his first deployment from Germany to Iraq, he filed his application for recognition as a conscientious objector. In preparing his application, he was counseled by Military Counseling Network (MCN), in Bammantal, Germany, a project of the German Mennonite Peace Committee and a member of the GI Rights Hotline. While in Iraq, Aguayo refused to load his gun as required when on guard duty or patrol.
Although the officers and experts who interviewed Aguayo found him to be sincere and recommended granting his CO application, it was ultimately denied by higher officers in August, 2004. No reasons were given. With the assistance of American Voices Abroad Military Project (AVA), a network of U.S. peace activists in Europe and the Center on Conscience and War in DC, Aguayo’s wife Helga after several months raised enough funds to retain attorneys Peter Goldberg and Jim Feldman of Philadelphia to file his civil lawsuit as a plaintiff against the Secretary of the Army. In this suit, Aguayo argues that the Army has given no grounds for rejecting his application. “Under compulsion of conscience,” Aguayo wrote in his statement to the court, “I will risk court-martial and imprisonment rather than deploy.”
On August 24, 2006, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ruled in favor of the Army and against Aguayo. Meanwhile, in Schweinfurt he had received orders to deploy to Iraq for another year. His active duty contract, due to expire in January, 2007, was extended (he was stop-lossed) by the Army until at least September, 2007. On August 25th, he filed the present appeal. His petition to the federal court for a stay of deployment to any war zone pending the court’s decision on the appeal was denied. The Army moved to have the appeal dismissed and summarily affirm Lamberth’s decision, but this petition was also denied, and the appeal was put on an expedited track.
On September 1st, Aguayo’s unit, the Army’s 1st Infantry Division deployed to Iraq again. On September 2nd, he turned himself in to the U.S. military police in Schweinfurt, expecting to serve a jail sentence.
But his rear detachment commander ordered him brought to Iraq, by force if needed. In uniform, Aguayo escaped through a rear window of his military living quarters in Schweinfurt. Now AWOL (absent without leave) and a fugitive, he made his way to his family in California. Following a dramatic press conference in Los Angeles on September 26th, during which Aguayo for the first time spoke with the media about his beliefs, he drove with family and supporters to Fort Irwin, the Army training camp in the Mojave Desert, and turned himself in.
According to the Army, Aguayo may now be charged with “desertion to avoid hazardous duty, and missing movement.” These charges combined carry a stiff penalty of seven years imprisonment. The final charges will be determined at a pre-trial Army Article 32 hearing in Germany scheduled for early December. At the beginning of October, Aguayo’s unit in Germany sent military personnel to Fort Irwin to bring him to the U.S. military detention center in Mannheim, Germany – the largest overseas U.S. military prison with approximately 200 U.S. military. Currently he is in pre-trial confinement.
Aguayo’s attorney, Peter Goldberger, says that all of Aguayo’s actions arose out of his sincere conscientious objector beliefs, which have been wrongly denied by the Army, and that the charges must therefore be dismissed if the Court of Appeals finds his case against the Army to have merit. The Army argues that the federal court should defer to their military “expertise” regarding their denial of Aguayo’s conscientious objector application. The outcome of this case will, Aguayo’s attorneys say, “likely profoundly influence the willingness of the civilian courts to question the Executive’s refusal to honor the right of U.S. military personnel to exercise their freedom of religion, including the right—in accordance with conscience—not to participate in war.”
Aguayo’s immediate family – his wife, Helga, age 33, and their eleven-year-old twin daughters – have returned to Los Angeles from the Army base in Schweinfurt, where they were living with him and also where they waited for him to return during his first year-long deployment to Iraq. Their contact with Agustin has been reduced to brief phone calls he is allowed to make from Mannheim. “He has never before broken the law,” she says. “He is a conscientious objector, but the Army forced him to become a resister. If he is a true conscientious objector, what else could he have done? We have been married for fifteen years. I know him better than anyone, and I know he is sincere.”
Helga is struggling to raise funds for his sizable legal fees and is seeking a job to support their children. Funds can be donated for the Aguayo case via the Website http://www.AguayoDefense.org.
Agustin is allowed to receive correspondence and postcards in the Mannheim prison. According to Helga, “Letters and postcards from supporters are pouring in, and this very much lifts Augie’s spirits. He is sad, though, that he cannot reply, as he is only allowed ten stamps a month.”
EXCERPTS OF AGUSTIN AGUAYO’S STATEMENT TO THE U.S. DISTRICT COURT
I have been to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom II, and I know what to expect. I know what will be expected of me. And because of this first-hand knowledge, I simply cannot take part in this deployment… By helping countless soldiers for “sick-call” as well as driving soldiers around on patrols I helped them get physically better and be able to go out and do the very thing I am against – kill…
As a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom II, I have seen many veterans whose lives have been shattered. Many men came back with missing parts, and countless physical and emotional scars, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I have personally seen my comrades come back to commit suicide, drink themselves to death, and develop a strong addiction to drugs. It is obvious to me that these men’s lives were destroyed by war. What participation in war does to our own soldiers is another reason why war is fundamentally immoral and wrong…
In my last deployment, I witnessed how soldiers dehumanize the Iraqi people with words and actions. I saw countless innocent lives which were shortened due to the war. I still struggle with the senselessness of it all – Iraqi civilians losing their lives because they drove too close to a convoy or a check point, soldiers being shot by mistake by their own buddies, misunderstandings (due to the language barrier) leading to death. This is not acceptable to me. It makes no sense that to better the lives of these civilians they must first endure great human loss…
I would much rather suffer the consequences of missing a movement – prosecution by court-martial – than be part of any war activity. To participate in this deployment I would have to ignore my deep sense of responsibility to uphold my moral values. No human has the moral authority to decide when it’s acceptable to end another’s life in this way.
I have made my choice for peace, for humanity, and for a better tomorrow. Even though I understand that one of the consequences of refusing to deploy may possibly be a trial by court-martial and even my imprisonment, I cannot and will not deploy.
Agustin Aguayo
August, 2006
Schweinfurt Army Base, Germany
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Agustin Aguayo’s full statement to the court, as well as pleadings and court decisions, can be found on http://www.AguayoDefense.org. Also see http://agustin-aguayo.blogspot.com/
The Army will forward correspondence to Germany. Agustin Aguayo’s postal address is:
SPC Agustín Aguayo,
Unit 29723
Box LL
APO, AE 09028-3810
USA
This past weekend, I had a wonderful lunch with a woman and her husband. He is a purple heart Marine from World War II. He has a hard time talking about his experiences in the war and rarely says much about the military. He opened up after we heard a radio report about all the murder in Iraq. With a far away gaze in his eyes, he muttered, “This war is a disaster.” As a veteran, I am sure he could never imagined having said anything like that only two years ago. But the truth laid into him just like the bullet that earned him his purple heart many years ago. He wiped tears from his eyes as we all quietly nodded in agreement. He sacrificed as did the whole country during WWII, but during this “war” (actually a military action), this country has not been asked to give much of itself other than to buy a yellow magnetic car ribbon. So, I attach the You Tube video from the Asylum Street Spankers, as this song tries to bring some humor to what is actually a real “disaster.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmsOIjzQ1V8
Posted by oncall | November 20, 2006 11:51 PM
I think this war is hard on many veterans, My oldest brother was a gunner in a helicopter in Vietnam. On one of his R&R’s at Thanksgiving in ‘67 he brought another Marine home with him. The next year he returned home and we asked abot his friend, and to see the look in his eyes when he told us he had been killed was just overwhelming.
He never talks about his experiences in Nam and I really wish he would, he’s just about to end his 3rd marriage and drinking and a temper that goes along with it, is IMO caused by his days in Nam.
I asked him awhile back what he thought of this war, and this big burly guy just bowed his head down and said I don’t want to see anymore die. It brought tears to my eyes seeing the pain he was in to just answer this question.
Like Senator Kerry says “it’s time to get serious” and also “And as in Vietnam, we have stayed and fought and died even though it is time for us to go.”