US War Vets to Speak Publicly About War Crimes
A group of war veterans are to descend on Washington this week to testify about war crimes they either committed or witnessed in Iraq.
This is a deliberate attempt to recreate the Vietnam Veterans Against the War campaign which gathered in Detroit in 1971 protesting against the atrocities being committed in Vietnam."The war in Iraq is not covered to its potential because of how dangerous it is for reporters to cover it," said Liam Madden, a former Marine and member of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War. "That's left a lot of misconceptions in the minds of the American public about what the true nature of military occupation looks like."
Iraq Veterans Against the War argues that well-publicized incidents of American brutality like the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of an entire family of Iraqis in the town of Haditha are not the isolated incidents perpetrated by "a few bad apples," as many politicians and military leaders have claimed. They are part of a pattern, the group says, of "an increasingly bloody occupation."
"This is our generation getting to tell history," Madden told OneWorld, "to ensure that the actual history gets told – that it's not a sugar-coated, diluted version of what actually happened."
The most famous speech to come out of Detroit remains as pertinent today as it was back then. In 1971 John Kerry said:Atrocities like the My Lai massacre had ignited popular opposition to the war, but political and military leaders insisted that such crimes were isolated exceptions.
"Initially even the My Lai massacre was denied," notes Gerald Nicosia, whose book Home to War provides the most exhaustive history of the Vietnam veterans' movement.
"The US military has traditionally denied these accusations based on the fact that 'this is a crazy soldier' or 'this is a malcontent' – that you can't trust this person. And that is the reason that Vietnam Veterans Against the War did this unified presentation in Detroit in 1971.
"They brought together their bonafides and wore their medals and showed it was more than one or two or three malcontents. It was medal-winning, honored soldiers – veterans in a group verifying what each other said to try to convince people that these charges cannot be denied. That people are doing these things as a matter of policy."
"Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be – and these are his words – 'the first President to lose a war'. We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"As Bush appears to have no plan for Iraq other than to hand it over to his successor, the same dynamic exists today. How many people must die in order to ensure that Bush can hand his defeat in Iraq to another US president?
The war vets aim to make people more aware of what is actually being done in their name as opposed to the sanitised version being served to them by the media. If more people realised what was being done in places like Iraq, I think Bush would have a much harder time passing his mistake on to someone else.
After all, the people making these charges are actual vets, people who have seen what the press - who are largely absent from Iraq - have not.
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6 comments:
I agree on most counts, but on one main point I disagree. The situation will not right itself. The public, genetically malequipped to cope psychologically with an increasingly sophisticated technological environment, cannot face the idea that the problem is systemic. People are too caught up in the blame game to be able to see all this for what it is. We are all lulled by modern electronic entertainment. What little rage we do have is channeled harmlessly into blogs, EverQuest 2, consumerism, and so on.
Considering all this, I see the system not so much dying as just sort of realizing that it has beaten the individual spirit, and thus kind of giving up. Tortoise and the Hare story.
But in this story, the tortoise will never overtake the hare, because the tortoise, too, will have given up.
I therefore see a very boggy and boring and slow end to all this, a few hundred years hence.
Our tempests in teapots will have to suffice for our intellectual stimulation.
The above applies to me as well.
To continue my reverie:
...And then we will all settle down for a long winter's nap that lasts many, many generations, and then we will stir, get up, start walking around, and make beautiful things again. Then the beautiful things will turn ugly and we will forget it happened before and the cycle will continue. It's comical, to me.
Will,
I've answered this guy several times with my view on the military machine, but he never engages. He seems to come on here, post the same stuff every time... and then bugger off.
But Will, as someone who puts his rage into a blog,I have to agree that you might have a point!
Ha, like a personal one-man idea-spamming machine...people are odd. I went and checked out his profile. He's a sportsman and "small business counselor" in Minnesota, my old home state.
I love change. It happens in small, personal ways, if one is lucky and determined. Patterns frighten me and give me the impression of being imprisoned. Like Scrooge's friend Marley, one's habits can form a chain that binds you.
It is odd that this guy posts and then buggers off! As you say, a one man spamming machine. Bless him though, his hearts in the right place...
:) Yes, indeed, Kel. Sweet fella.
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