and they sent them to the war to be slain to be slain
The following is part one of a piece I originally wrote for the New Standard, which for a few goofball reasons got killed. I haven't bothered editing it beyond first or second drafts, but if I do say so myself, it isn't half bad. It had a tad more relevance a week ago, though I think there's still some new stuff you might be able to get out of it. Anyway, it's better than that movie with the Rock and Christopher Walken on Cinemax right now, so check it out.
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In his acceptance speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention, President Bush said he invaded Iraq to “defend America.”
However, Bush failed to mention the estimated thirteen to fourteen thousand Iraqi civilians killed in order to defend the U.S. since the spring of 2003.
In 1971, as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the human cost of U.S. aggression in Southeast Asia.
However, in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Kerry failed to mention Najaf, Fallujah, or Abu Gharib.
"Any adult discussion has been put on hold until the election is over," says Kathy Kelly, co-director of the Nobel Peace Prize nominated Voices in the Wilderness. Kelly and other members of the eight-year-old group have been advocating on behalf of ordinary Iraqis and regularly traveling to the country through the 1990's, sometimes carrying medical supplies in defiance of U.S. State Department orders.
"These matters should be discussed," Kelly says. "The war that we're presently mired in is causing the U.S. to create more terrorists faster than they can kill them."
Zeynep Toufe remembers looking over posted transcripts of speeches given during the Democratic National Convention, "and you couldn't even find the word 'Iraqi', except once, in a speech John Edwards gave."
"At least Bush was sounding more concerned about the people," the writer and blogger of Under the Same Sun says. "And his actions belie that he meant any of it, but at least you could hold him to something."
"I do think Bush has been advised by the neocon fantasizers," says Kathy Kelly, referring to the claque of "total war" ideologues personified by Cheney and Rumsfeld underlings Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith. "Presumably, that group would not be invited to meetings" in a Kerry White House, she says.
To hear them say it on the stump, the two major party candidates have staked out clearly defined, opposing views on post-invasion Iraq and the U.S. role in the country’s future.
"Thanks to our troops, and thanks to the troops of our friends, one of the most evil and brutal regimes in history no longer exists," the President told soldiers stationed at Fort Lewis in Washington state in June. "Iraq is better off today, America is more secure today, because Saddam Hussein sits in a prison cell."
"When it comes to Iraq, it’s not that I would have done one thing differently, I would’ve done almost everything differently," Kerry said at the 86th Annual American Legion Convention held in Tennessee this past August.
Kerry, according to Zeynep Toufe, had “been running to the right of Bush” on Iraq until he lashed out at the President in a policy address given at New York University on September 20th.
“Here's an example of Kerry sometimes running to the right of Bush,” she explained. “[Kerry says] ‘George Bush retreated from Fallujah and other communities in Iraq which are now overrun with terrorists and threaten our troops.’
”A thousand or more Iraqis were killed in Fallujah as a result of our bombing,” she says. “It would have taken thousands more of them and maybe hundreds of our soldiers dying to ‘retake’ the city from its residents who clearly do not want us there.”
”So, what's Kerry's position here, that we should have bombed it even more?” she asks. “He should know what this all means as this is similar to free fire zones in Vietnam, which he called ‘war crimes’ back then, when he seemed to have gained some moral clarity as a result of his exposure to that war.”
Toufe says the stance Kerry has taken up since the NYU speech is “still very muddled.”
"I'm not sure if [the Kerry campaign has] made up their mind on being truthful or moral," she says.
In that speech, the Massachusetts senator highlighted four major policy goals for a Kerry Administration in Iraq.
The first would be to push for involvement of more international troops, drawn from NATO countries and other regional powers, primarily to patrol the country's border and train new Iraqi security forces. He would also lean on partnering countries for additional aid, and signaled he would open up reconstruction and oil development efforts to the international community. With more of the world on board, Kerry says he would then fast-track training and recruitment for a new Iraqi army and police force.
Third, Kerry says his administration would make a bid for hearts and minds by cutting off reconstruction contract bingers like Halliburton. He would shift work to “high-visibility, quick impact projects on the local level,” and include more Iraqi contractors and workers. More international aid and involvement in reconstruction, the Kerry campaign says, would dispel “the continuing perception of a U.S. occupation.”
With heavy U.N. backing and more funding, Kerry says he would move to prioritize a slate of elections, and the creation of a national constitution to establish “long-term power sharing arrangements” among Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups.
On top of this, Kerry previously had pledged another 40,000 troops to send to Iraq if he were elected, though he promised to bring American soldiers home sometime in his first term as president.
Alongside President Bush’s use of Iraq as a rhetorical device at campaign stops, the outline of the Kerry plan appears bold and comprehensive. Bush, in fact, outlined a similar five-point plan at the U.S. War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in May.
After first extending "full sovereignty" to the interim government, Bush promised the "forces and support necessary" to "stabilize" Iraq, as well as to train a new Iraqi army and police force. The President then said the U.S. would renew focus on rebuilding infrastructure to "gain economic independence and a better quality of life" for Iraqis. Security duties would eventually be split with NATO countries and other allies. Finally, a round of national elections supervised by the U.N. to ensure a "truly representative national governing body" would be planned for January 2005.
As it stands now, a possible Kerry Administration differs with the current Bush Administration on the role of the international community as a catalyst for jump-starting the country's broken economy and to do away with the image of an occupying American force.
Both candidates call for more American troops, the inclusion of NATO troops, "Iraqization" of security forces, and U.N. supervision of elections.
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