President Obama Forgoes Memory For Memorial Day

In his weekly address last Saturday, George III President Barack Obama brought up an interesting anecdote regarding the origins of Memorial Day. Naturally, the Obama-loving Daily Kos was all over it yet in their hosannas they seemed to be as irony-challenged as the President himself.

Toward the close of his address, the President mentioned a group of southern women in 1866 who’d arrived at a cemetery to pay their respects to fallen Confederate soldiers of the Civil War. Then they noticed the graves of Union soldiers who’d also fallen but whose graves were being ignored.

What Obama didn’t mention was how those graves got there to begin with. Memorial Day didn’t start with the formation of a Memorial Day Commission a few years later but days after Appomattox with a group of freed slaves in South Carolina, the state in which the war began. These men, the Freedmen, knowing the bodies of Union soldiers who’d fallen in Confederate territory were unceremoniously buried in mass graves, took the extraordinary step of disinterring those bodies one at a time and giving each man his own grave so he could be honored properly.

African Americans had to have their own Memorial Day because no one thought to honor them for their own brave service to their country and they started the tradition with honoring the Union soldiers who’d died to help liberate them.

But that’s not why I’m taking the President to task.

In his four minute-long address to the nation last Saturday, Obama neatly extracted a page from the Bush/Cheney playbook, one revised and perfected by two draft-dodging scumbags, and conflated WWI and Korea with the defense of our freedoms. WWI had nothing whatsoever to do with defending our freedoms. World War One was a war between European empires.

As with Pearl Harbor and World War Two, which actually did threaten American freedom in a nominal way, President Wilson hurled us into WWI largely as a response to the sinking of the Lusitania and the deaths of many Americans in 1915. Yet even then, it still took us nearly two years to enter the war effort. In our brief involvement with the Great War, over 100,000 men perished.

Yet we could have sat out that war without suffering any fallout here at home.

Korea was all about the stopping of Communist expansion in the 38th parallel at the height of the Cold War. It was the first of the two great “police actions” (the other being Vietnam) that was waged to halt the spread of Communist aggression. And the Korean “War” was never officially ended. To this day, half a century later, we still have 5000 troops in South Korea that are rotated out every 12 months.

Neither WWI and Korea had anything to do with ensuring our freedoms. So should we honor those men and women who had fallen in those two conflicts? Absolutely but let’s do so in the proper context and not legitimize the circumstances of their sacrifices by lumping them into “legitimate” wars like the Revolutionary, Civil and second World Wars.

And let’s not glorify war, either. Never was there a single word or syllable uttered by the president, who also never served his nation’s military, expressing regret or any actual sorrow that these men and women died in uniform for their country at the whims of European madmen, Communist dictators and our own military industrial complex that Obama is even now enriching at an even greater clip than we ever saw under Bush and Cheney.

As Rep. Alan Grayson, a real Democrat, says in his latest dispatch, “We’ve Always Been at War with Eastasia“:

On May 30, 2010, at 10:06 a.m, the direct cost of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan will hit $1 trillion. And in a few weeks, the House of Representatives will be asked to vote for $33 billion of additional “emergency” supplemental spending to continue the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. There will be the pretense of debate – speeches on the floor of both chambers, stern requests for timetables or metrics or benchmarks – but this war money will get tossed in the wood chipper without difficulty, requested by a President who ran on an anti-war platform. Passing this legislation will mark the breaking of another promise to America, the promise that all war spending would be done through the regular budget process. Not through an off-budget swipe of our Chinese credit card.

The war money could be used for schools, bridges, or paying everyone’s mortgage payments for a whole year. It could be used to end federal income taxes on every American’s first $35,000 of income, as my bill, the War Is Making You Poor Act, does. It could be used to close the yawning deficit, supply health care to the unemployed, or for any other human and humane purpose.

Instead, it will be used for war. Because, as Orwell predicted in 1984, we’ve reached the point where everyone thinks that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia. Why?

Not because Al Qaeda was sheltered in Iraq. It wasn’t. And not because Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. It isn’t. Bush could never explain why we went to war in Iraq, and Obama can’t explain why we are ‘escalating’ in Afghanistan.

So, why? Why spend $1 trillion on a long, bloody nine-year campaign with no justifiable purpose?

Remember 9/11, the day that changed everything? That was almost a decade ago. Bush’s response was to mire us in two bloody wars, wars in which we are still stuck today. Why?

I can’t answer that question. But I do have an alternative vision of how the last 10 years could have played out.

Imagine if we had decided after 9/11 to wean ourselves off oil and other carbon-based fuels. We’d be almost ten years into that project by now.

Imagine if George W. Bush had somehow been able to summon the moral strength of Mahatma Gandhi, Helen Keller, or Martin Luther King Jr, and committed the American people to the pursuit of a common goal of a transformed society, a society which meets our own human needs rather than declaring “war” on an emotion, or, as John Quincy Adams put it, going “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.

Imagine.

Imagine that we chose not to enslave ourselves to a massive military state whose stated goal is “stability” in countries that never have been “stable”, and never will be.

Imagine.

“Imagine all the people, living life in peace.”

It’s kind of ironic that our new President, one who ran on and won the presidency on a vaguely visionary platform, can’t imagine the same: A world in which we don’t have to fold Memorial Day observations into an extended weekend more characterized by a day off from work, cookouts, beer and the official opening of local beaches.

There will always be war and there will always be war dead, with men and women fated to die young before raising families or realizing dreams and ambitions. That is a sad fact of life. But all too many of us, our own president included, completely lack enough visionary courage or desire to even try to imagine a world without needless, economy-crippling wars that kill uniformed and civilian men, women and more children than we also have the courage to contemplate.

Because, after all, great realities all too often begin with humble dreams.

Memorial Day in photographs

…over at JP’s place.

Not just a number

Brad Friedman has all the names of all those killed in George Bush’s war.

Today is in memory of their lives, and thanks for their service.

And our promise that we’ll do everything we can to make sure that future presidents only commit troops to war when it’s absolutely necessary.

When a president betrays both the people he serves and the military he leads

Krugman:

Future historians will shake their heads over how easily America was misled into war. The warning signs, the indications that we had a rogue administration determined to use 9/11 as an excuse for war, were there, for those willing to see them, right from the beginning — even before Mr. Bush began explicitly pushing for war with Iraq.

In fact, the very first time Mr. Bush declared a war on terror that “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” people should have realized that he was going to use the terrorist attack to justify anything and everything.

When he used his first post-attack State of the Union to denounce an “axis of evil” consisting of three countries that had nothing to do either with 9/11 or with each other, alarm bells should have gone off.

But the nation, brought together in grief and anger over the attack, wanted to trust the man occupying the White House. And so it took a long time before Americans were willing to admit to themselves just how thoroughly their trust had been betrayed.

It’s a terrible story, yet it’s also understandable. I wasn’t really surprised by Republican election victories in 2002 and 2004: nations almost always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how bad the leaders and no matter how poorly conceived the war.

The question was whether the public would ever catch on. Well, to the immense relief of those who spent years trying to get the truth out, they did. Last November Americans voted overwhelmingly to bring an end to Mr. Bush’s war.

Yet the war goes on.

To keep the war going, the administration has brought the original bogyman back out of the closet. At first, Mr. Bush said he would bring Osama bin Laden in, dead or alive. Within seven months after 9/11, however, he had lost interest: “I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure,” he said in March 2002. “I truly am not that concerned about him.”

In all of 2003, Mr. Bush, who had an unrelated war to sell, made public mention of the man behind 9/11 only seven times.

But Osama is back: last week Mr. Bush invoked his name 11 times in a single speech, warning that if we leave Iraq, Al Qaeda — which wasn’t there when we went in — will be the winner. And Democrats, still fearing that they will end up accused of being weak on terror and not supporting the troops, gave Mr. Bush another year’s war funding.

Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.

Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.

When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.

And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.

But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.

Of course this requires that Americans begin to question some of the notions we’ve held most dear — that our leaders act in our own best interest. That a president and his vice president take seriously their oaths of office instead of regarding them as license to plunder an entire planet for their own personal gain, whether emotional or financial. That our government is basically good. The Bush Administration has put this notion to the test more than any administration before it, even that of Richard Nixon. The American public has begun to wake up, but the so-called loyal opposition has yet to realize that. Or maybe they have, but they don’t care, in which case we are even worse off than we thought.

But it’s one thing to sit here in my comfortable home on a day off from work, ordering USO care packages and preaching to the choir. The real sufferers of the consequences of the Administration’s corruption and the Democrats’ spinelessness are the men and women like this one:

My name is Donald Hudson Jr. I have been serving our country’s military actively for the last three years. I am currently deployed to Baghdad on Forward Operating Base Loyalty, where I have been for the last four and a half months.

I came here as part of the first wave of this so called “troop surge”, but so far it has effectively done nothing to quell insurgent violence. I have seen the rise in violence between the Sunni and Shiite. This country is in the middle of a civil war that has been on going since the seventh century.

Why are we here when this country still to date does not want us here? Why does our president’s personal agenda consume him so much, that he can not pay attention to what is really going on here?

Let me tell you a story. On May 10, I was out on a convoy mission to move barriers from a market to a joint security station. It was no different from any other night, except the improvised explosive device that hit our convoy this time, actually pierced through the armor of one of our trucks. The truck was immediately engulfed in flames, the driver lost control and wrecked the truck into one of the buildings lining the street. I was the driver of the lead truck in our convoy; the fifth out of six was the one that got hit. All I could hear over the radio was a friend from the sixth truck screaming that the fifth truck was burning up real bad, and that they needed fire extinguishers real bad. So I turned my truck around and drove through concrete barriers to get to the burning truck as quickly as I could. I stopped 30 meters short of the burning truck, got out and ripped my fire extinguisher out of its holder, and ran to the truck. I ran past another friend of mine on the way to the burning truck, he was screaming something but I could not make it out. I opened the driver’s door to the truck and was immediately overcome by the flames. I sprayed the extinguisher into the door, and then I saw my roommate’s leg. He was the gunner of that truck. His leg was across the driver’s seat that was on fire and the rest of his body was further in the truck. My fire extinguisher died and I climbed into the truck to attempt to save him. I got to where his head was, in the back passenger-side seat. I grabbed his shoulders and attempted to pull him from the truck out the driver’s door. I finally got him out of the truck head first. His face had been badly burned. His leg was horribly wounded. We placed him on a spine board and did our best to attempt “Buddy Aid”. We heard him trying to gasp for air. He had a pulse and was breathing, but was not responsive. He was placed into a truck and rushed to the “Green Zone”, where he died within the hour. His name was Michael K. Frank. He was 36 years old. He was a great friend of mine and a mentor to most of us younger soldiers here.

Now I am still here in this country wondering why, and having to pick up the pieces of what is left of my friend in our room. I would just like to know what is the true reason we are here? This country poses no threat to our own. So why must we waste the lives of good men on a country that does not give a damn about itself? Most of my friends here share my views, but do not have the courage to say anything.

I hope that every Democrat who voted to give this president a blank check to continue this war with no accountability, no timetable, and no benchmarks for accomplishment other than the one that will give most of Iraq’s oil profits to George W. Bush’s friends in the oil industry, because they were afraid that conservatives would say mean things, thinks about Donald C. Hudson, Jr. today — and thinks about what he or she would say to Pvt. Hudson were they to meet face to face.

I don’t have the same hope for Republicans, because they have already shown us over the last five years that they plainly don’t give a shit.

(h/t: Americablog)

The loss most of us can’t even fathom

These are some of the faces of war that we don’t see and that the Bush Administration, as they wave their flags and talk of valor and sacrifice and try to stoke the fears of Americans in order to continue to slake their bloodlust.

Deanna Salie, Iraq widow:

My husband was certain that he was going to die in Iraq.

Sgt. 1st Class David J. Salie had been an American soldier for almost 17 years. He’d deployed many times, and he’d been to war before. He’d parachuted into Panama with the 82nd Airborne Division, served in the Gulf War and gone to Haiti with the 25th Infantry Division. But he’d never been so certain that he was going to die that he prepared for death.

David told me that he wouldn’t be coming back. I didn’t believe him. I felt that he was just under so much stress thinking of our children and me, and about the 40 soldiers in his platoon who were his responsibility.

In the month before he left for Iraq with B Company, 2nd of the 69th Armor, 3rd Infantry Division, David went over his will with a fine-toothed comb, and he checked out his Survivor’s Group Life Insurance, which provides protection for military people.

David even gave away some of his personal belongings. He also checked on the death benefits that a soldier’s family receives.

My husband came home and proudly announced that if he died in Iraq, his family would be taken care of. I tried to tell him that he shouldn’t worry about things like that. He said that every soldier going to war worries about his family and wants to make sure that if he’s killed, his family will be taken care of just as they would be if he were still alive.

We were “all squared away,” David told me.

I wish I could say that he was wrong about dying and right about the rest of it. Instead, he was correct in his premonition about his own death, but wrong in his belief that we were “squared away.”

On the evening of Feb. 14, 2005, a little after 9 p.m., I heard a knock on the front door of our house at Fort Benning, Ga. I got up from the couch in the living room, where I’d been resting with a sick child, and I saw two soldiers in dress green uniforms standing on the front porch.

After making it through my husband’s funeral, I was greeted with mountains of paperwork.

I was escorted from office to office by my casualty officer as my military identification card was changed and reissued; as I signed up for the Veterans Administration’s Dependency and Indemnity Compensation and the military’s Survivor’s Benefit Plan.

I reviewed the paperwork after all of these appointments, and I was shocked to discover that David had been wrong: We weren’t going to be cared for as if he were still alive.

My husband didn’t know that dependents’ compensation offsets the Survivor’s Benefit Plan. If he’d known that, it would have made him very angry.

DIC is a payment made to widows, their children and some parents who’ve lost a husband, father or son. Widows are entitled to the benefit for the remainder of their lives, unless they remarry. DIC comes from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

SBP pays a deceased soldier’s income, and it comes from the Department of Defense.

The offset, a dollar-for-dollar deduction, is supposedly intended to prevent double-dipping from two similar benefit plans.

But the Survivors Benefit Plan and Dependents Indemnity Compensation are provided for different reasons, and the offset leaves many military families with no survivors’ benefits at all. Others receive only the pittance that’s left over after the offset is deducted.

As we try to rebuild our shattered lives, the offset deals us a second blow. Grief and loss are hard enough to handle, but now we have more important worries, such as providing homes, food, clothing and schooling for our families.

This is not a partisan political issue. This is not a matter of whether you’re for or against the war in Iraq. This is about those who died serving our country, standing between our enemies and us and believing that their families would be cared for if they gave their lives.

It’s a shame that that isn’t true.

Andrew J. Basevich, grieving father:

When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging “the terrorists,” opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops — today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I know that even now, people of good will find much to admire in Bush’s response to that awful day. They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won. Some — the members of the “the-surge-is-already-working” school of thought — even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. “The long war is an unwinnable one,” I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. “The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We’ve done all that we can do.”

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others — teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks — to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as “the will of the people.”

To be fair, responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove — namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Yes, we do now know. We always suspected, but now we know. So to whom do we turn to right the many, many wrongs that have been perpetrated upon America’s soldiers, their families, and indeed the millions of American citizens in whose name our own government has committed such heinous crimes? To whom can we turn? How do we right the wrongs when every corner of our government is as rotten and putrid and filthy as the occupiers of the executive branch?

The casualties all the politicians will want to forget tomorrow

Here’s one of them:

His name was Sergeant James Dean, but everyone called him Jamie. He was the farm boy who fished, hunted and tossed a horseshoe like nobody else. He was the guy at the end of Toots Bar, nursing a Bud and talking Nascar. He was the driver of that blue Silverado at the red light, his hands on the wheel, his mind on combat horrors that made him moody, angry, withdrawn.

Now here he was, another American soldier, dead. Only Sergeant Dean was killed at the front door of his childhood home, the day after Christmas and three weeks before his redeployment, shot by a sniper representing the government for whom he had already risked his life in Afghanistan. His wife and parents received the news not by a knock on the door, but by gunfire in the neighborhood.

“If they had just left him alone,” says his wife, Muriel.

[snip]

A few days after Thanksgiving, a FedEx truck delivered an envelope to the Dean farm just as Jamie was about to go hunting. It was a form letter of redeployment, as impersonal as a bank statement.

“It was downhill after that,” Muriel says.

He withdrew from the present, it seemed. He drank more, and took his medication less. Finally, on Christmas Day, he and Muriel returned from a family gathering with plans to watch his favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys, on television. He went out to buy some beer — but went to Toots Bar instead.

She called him, and he came home, livid. He smashed some glasses, said something about winding up in a body bag, and sped away in his Silverado. He wound up at the family home, alone, talking on a cellphone with his sister, Kelly, saying things like: “I just can’t do it anymore.”

When his sister heard a gunshot, she called 911. The deputy sheriffs arrived at the isolated farmhouse around 10 p.m. and quickly determined that Jamie was drunk, agitated and carrying a shotgun. He told the deputies to back off.

Based on something a family member had said, the police knew that Jamie had other shotguns in the house, but they mistakenly believed he was an Army Ranger. “Rambo,” his mother says ruefully.

At 4:19 in the morning, the police shot dozens of tear-gas canisters, smashing the windows in front of Jamie’s horseshoe trophies, piercing walls decorated with garland. Several minutes later, Jamie fired shotgun pellets in the general direction of a police car parked at least 50 yards away. Then he sat down on the back porch.

A situation in which an armed man was in his own house, alone and a threat to no one but himself, had now escalated into a military action. On the ground, men with guns; in the sky, the whop-whop of helicopters. Now and then, Jamie would respond to some movement or sound with a shot into the ground or into the air.

[snip]

Around noon, two negotiators pulled up to a family friend’s garage, where Jamie’s loved ones were cloistered a half-mile away. His wife was pacing. His mother was bracing herself. His father, Joey, was staring into the woods.

[snip]

At 12:25, a negotiator talked briefly by telephone to Jamie, who indicated he might come out; “I’m going home,” he said. Then the police cellphone’s battery died.

At 12:34, Jamie was reached again by telephone, but the volume was low and the negotiator could not make out what was being said.

At 12:45, the police cut power to the house and began shooting more tear gas through the front and the back of the house.

At 12:47, an armored vehicle called a Peace Keeper pulled up to the house. Jamie opened the front door and, according to the police, pointed his 20-gauge shotgun at the vehicle. A state police sniper, positioned in a garage 70 yards away, took aim.

Later, a spokesman for the Maryland State Police would say the department was reviewing its actions, but would refer to a statement by its superintendent, Col. Thomas E. Hutchins, in which he said that Sergeant Dean bore “sole responsibility.” The police could not walk away, the colonel had said, because the soldier had the potential to do harm to himself or to others.

Later, Richard D. Fritz, the state’s attorney for St. Mary’s County, would criticize the state police as using tactics that were “progressively assaultive” and “most unfortunate.” In the end, he would say, this paramilitary operation was “directed at an individual down at the end of a dark road, holed up in his father’s house, with no hostages.”

I can’t remember another Memorial Day weekend in which I felt so utterly, completely just…..sad.