Here's a couple interesting articles I ran across on the internet:

quote:



For the past six months, I have been participating in what I believe to be the great modern lie: Operation Iraqi Freedom. After the horrific events of September 11 2001, and throughout the battle in Afghanistan, the groundwork was being laid for the invasion of Iraq.




"Shock and awe" were the words used to describe the display of power that the world was going to view upon the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. It was to be an up-close, dramatic display of military strength and advanced technology from within the arsenals of the American and British military.



But as a soldier preparing to take part in the invasion of Iraq, the words "shock and awe" rang deep within my psyche. Even as we prepared to depart, it seemed that these two great superpowers were about to break the very rules that they demanded others obey. Without the consent of the United Nations, and ignoring the pleas of their own citizens, the US and Britain invaded Iraq.



"Shock and awe"? Yes, the words correctly described the emotional impact I felt as we embarked on an act not of justice, but of hypocrisy.



From the moment the first shot was fired in this so- called war of liberation and freedom, hypocrisy reigned.



After the broadcasting of recorded images of captured and dead US soldiers on Arab television, American and British leaders vowed revenge while verbally assaulting the networks for displaying such vivid images. Yet within hours of the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons, the US government released horrific photographs of the two dead brothers for the entire world to view. Again, a "do as we say and not as we do" scenario.



As soldiers serving in Iraq, we have been told that our purpose is to help the people of Iraq by providing them with the necessary assistance militarily, as well as in humanitarian efforts. Then tell me where the humanity is in the recent account in Stars and Stripes (the newspaper of the US military) of two young children brought to a US military camp by their mother in search of medical care.



The two children had, unknowingly, been playing with explosive ordnance they had found, and as a result they were severely burned. The account tells how, after an hour-long wait, they - two children - were denied care by two US military doctors. A soldier described the incident as one of many "atrocities" on the part of the US military he had witnessed.



Thankfully, I have not personally been a witness to atrocities - unless, of course, you consider, as I do, that this war in Iraq is the ultimate atrocity.



So what is our purpose here? Was this invasion because of weapons of mass destruction, as we have so often heard? If so, where are they? Did we invade to dispose of a leader and his regime because they were closely associated with Osama bin Laden? If so, where is the proof?



Or is it that our incursion is about our own economic advantage? Iraq's oil can be refined at the lowest cost of any in the world. This looks like a modern-day crusade not to free an oppressed people or to rid the world of a demonic dictator relentless in his pursuit of conquest and domination, but a crusade to control another nation's natural resource. Oil - at least to me - seems to be the reason for our presence.



There is only one truth, and it is that Americans are dying. There are an estimated 10 to 14 attacks every day on our servicemen and women in Iraq. As the body count continues to grow, it would appear that there is no immediate end in sight.



I once believed that I was serving for a cause - "to uphold and defend the constitution of the United States". Now I no longer believe that; I have lost my conviction, as well as my determination. I can no longer justify my service on the basis of what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies.



With age comes wisdom, and at 36 years old I am no longer so blindly led as to believe without question.



From my arrival last November at Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, talk of deployment was heard, and as that talk turned to actual preparation, my heart sank and my doubts grew. My doubts have never faded; instead, it has been my resolve and my commitment that have.



My time here is almost done, as well as that of many others with whom I have served. We have all faced death in Iraq without reason and without justification. How many more must die? How many more tears must be shed before Americans awake and demand the return of the men and women whose job it is to protect them, rather than their leader's interest?



ยท Tim Predmore is a US soldier on active duty with the 101st Airborne Division, based near Mosul in northern Iraq. A version of this article appeared in the Peoria Journal Star, Illinois
source: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=4226

quote:
COMMENTARY
Cold War II: America needs you, Harry Truman
By Walter A McDougall*

The first Cold War crept in slowly and was not at all evident to most average Americans when President Truman addressed a joint session of Congress in March 1947. No US forces overseas, much less the United States itself, had been attacked, and Americans were obsessed with demobilizing from World War II and preventing a return of Great Depression conditions. So if Truman were to arouse the nation to resist world communism, he had to do what Senator Arthur Vandenberg recommended, which was to "scare the hell out of the American people"

The president explained that a moment in history had come when nearly every nation had to choose between freedom based on majority rule and human rights, or tyranny imposed through terror and oppression. He declared it the policy of the United States to support all peoples threatened by internal subversion or outside pressure and warned that an American failure to lead might endanger world peace and would surely endanger the welfare of the United States.

But the $400 million in aid that he requested for Greece and Turkey was only the ante the poker-loving Truman required to get America into the game. The ultimate cost of calling every Soviet bet and bluff in a game lasting years, perhaps decades, was bound to be immeasurably higher. What is more, this poker game carried the greatest of risks, not excluding that of nuclear war, and offered the American public no instant gratification or assurance of a future catharsis.

Walter Lippmann gave the conflict its name - the Cold War - and a left-to-right spectrum from Henry Wallace to George Kennan to Robert Taft immediately warned that a protracted conflict against the communist conspiracy might draw the United States into unlimited commitments, Machiavellian ploys, and collusion with all manner of foul bedfellows. But the Congress and public stood up almost as one behind the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, NATO, and the Korean War.

The second Cold War may also have crept up on us slowly. Leaving aside introspective domestic recriminations to the effect that America deserved the attack of September 11 (a matter best left to the purveyor of "infinite justice"), historians are certain to clash over questions of causality and blame. Did Americans' energy-guzzling habits, hence dependence on Persian Gulf oil and support for authoritarian Muslim regimes, create fertile soil for Islamic fanatics? Did American disengagement from Afghanistan following the expulsion of the Soviets permit the Taliban to seize power? Did American support for Israel and the 1991 war on Iraq validate in the bazaars an image of the United States as the Great Satan? Did the George H W Bush administration's display of irresistible military might but reluctance to finish off Saddam Hussein all but invite rogue states to wage asymmetrical warfare, including sponsorship of terrorist groups, to promote their agendas? Did the Clinton administration's penchant for poking, but not killing, the dens of rattlesnakes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan only stiffen their determination to show Americans how it feels to be defenseless before random assaults? Were US defense and intelligence agencies just not up to their job, in which case an entirely different set of questions dating back to Vietnam and Watergate needs to be asked?

Whatever the long-range causes of our second Cold War, public cognizance of it came in a flash and George W Bush had no need to scare the hell out of the American people when he addressed Congress on September 20. Otherwise, he faced the same task as Truman, which was to channel the public's fear, anger, and vengefulness into reservoirs to be husbanded, replenished in need, and gradually released to sustain public support for a conflict of unknown duration, cost, and risk. As in Truman's time the enemy is an abstraction - terrorism in place of communism - but one given sanctuary and support from sovereign states. As in Truman's time the president prefers not to declare formal war on those states, but rather puts them on notice as to the rules of engagement the United States intends to enforce in the protracted conflict to come. Truman did not expect to convert the Soviets to democracy, but he put them on notice that subversion and aggression were unacceptable weapons in the ideological contest. Likewise, Bush does not expect (as perhaps Clinton did) to persuade our adversaries to love Coca-Cola, Disney and Playboy. But he put them on notice that terrorism is an unacceptable weapon in the clash of cultures, estimated that terrorists lurk in no less than 60 nations, named the Islamic fundamentalists the heirs to all the murderous ideologues of the 20th Century, and vowed that the war would not end until every terrorist group of global reach had been crushed. Bush also specifically condemned neutralism ("Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists (1)), implied that all states who practice or abet terrorism are subject to retaliation in times and places of our own choosing, and cautioned that a long, twilight struggle lies before us. Thus did he conflate in his speech not only Truman's message, but Eisenhower's and Kennedy's as well.

Just as in the late 1940s, critics across the political spectrum warned that the Bush doctrine would require the United States to make unlimited commitments, adopt an amoral realpolitik, prop up "friendly tyrants," provoke still more hatred of America, and thus ratchet up the cycle of violence. But again, just as in 1947, the Congress and people declared themselves, almost unanimously, ready to ante up and get into the game, whatever the risks down the road.
source: http://www.atimes.com/front/CJ06Aa02.html