The Words of War Heroes Versus the Words of Bush/Co

By Lonna Gooden VanHorn, A version of this can be found in opednews, demsonline, and other net sites.

Now that the war with Iraq has proven to be such a disaster, the New York Times and the Washington Post have offered apologies, of sorts, for not asking the administration tougher pre-war questions about the necessity of going to war.  Some members of the broadcast media have also expressed regrets that they were so quick to support the war lust of this administration, as have several members of Congress.  

Since the media did not care to interview living people who questioned the advisability of war, one might have hoped the thoughtful ones among them would have at least examined what great leaders of the past – particularly leaders who had actually experienced war and its’ consequences -- had to say before blindly backing the dictates of a member of the Texas Air National Guard whose only combat experience before he became the “war president” was bravely defending the skies of Texas against the Viet Cong Air Force.

When members of the administration said that attacking Iraq would prevent terrorist attacks in the future, it would have been helpful for the people to have been aware of what Eisenhower said about that notion at a press conference in 1954

·        “A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility.  I don’t believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn’t even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked to me about such a thing.”

A living former commander and by all accounts a brilliant man, General Wesley Clark said: 

·        If we go in (to Iraq) unilaterally, or without the full weight of international organizations behind us, if we go in with a very sparse number of allies, if we go in without an effective information operation… we’re liable to supercharge recruiting for al-Qaida.”

Marine General Anthony Zinni, former Head of Central Command for U.S. Forces in the Middle East, echoed that sentiment:

·        “It’s pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others who have never fired a shot, and are hot to go to war, see it another…We are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started…”

When Bush, the armchair warrior Chalmers Johnson calls the “boy emperor” began talking about our “brave” soldiers and glorifying war, I wish someone would have quoted the words of a couple of career soldiers to him:

·        “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”                  

                                                                                                   Dwight D. Eisenhower                                         

·        “I have known war as few men now living know it.  It’s very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.” 

                                                                                                 General Douglas MacArthur      

Another war hero whose words I wish the media would have read when this administration began insinuating Americans needed to be terrified of Saddam Hussein is General Douglas MacArthur.  MacArthur said:

·        “The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear:  Keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry of grave national emergency.  Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded.  Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”

When Ari Fleischer and others began cautioning the people about speaking out, insinuating that questioning the president in a time of war is unpatriotic, it is too bad the media did not challenge them with the words of Teddy Roosevelt who disputed the idea that a president should be treated like a god when he said:

·        “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American public.”

Eisenhower seems to have agreed with that sentiment:

·        “May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

Harry Truman said:

·        “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voices of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

Mark Twain said:

·        “My country, always.  My government when it deserves it.”

Samuel Adams who said it was the duty of the patriot to protect the people from their government also said:

·        “The appeal to patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

Einstein provided an interesting explanation of why he hated the word "patriotism.” 

·        “Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them…[we] should not fight for imaginary geographical lines, racial prejudices and private greed draped in the colors of patriotism.”

One would think the opinion of one of the most intelligent men in history might have been worthy of discussion, along with the information that while Einstein would have been considered a traitor by his own country, by writing a letter to Roosevelt advising him the United States must develop a nuclear weapon before Germany did, he became a patriot to the world.  Writing that letter became the greatest regret of his life, but at the time he thought he had no choice.  Ultimately he believed humans must find a way to end war or they are doomed. 

When Paul Wolfowitz and others said that the war in Iraq would be a cakewalk, and would only cost about $50 billion dollars, most of which would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues, and that the Iraqi people would welcome our troops with open arms, perhaps the media would have been wise to remember the prescient words of former United States Marine Commandant General David Shoup who resigned his commission in 1963 because he didn’t believe the Vietnam War was worth the life of one American soldier.  He said in 1966:  

·        I believe that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. One that they design and want, one that they fight and work for. And if, unfortunately, their revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves" refused to share with the "have nots" by any peaceful method, at least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by Americans.

Hal Crowther has recently expounded on the impossibility of a successful occupation in “With Trembling Fingers.”

·         …”In Washington, chicken hawks will still be squawking about "digging in" and winning, but Vietnam proved conclusively that no modern war of occupation would ever be won. Every occupation is doomed. The only way you "win" a war of occupation is the old-fashioned way, the way Rome finally defeated the Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave everyone else, raze the cities and sow the fields with salt.

Otherwise the occupied people will fight you to the last peasant, and why shouldn't they? If our presidential election fails to dislodge the crazy bastards who annexed Baghdad, many of us in this country would welcome regime change by any intervention, human or divine. But if, say, the Chinese came in to rescue us--Operation American Freedom--how long would any of us, left-wing or right, put up with an occupying army teaching us Chinese-style democracy? A guerrilla who opposes an invading army on his own soil is not a terrorist, he's a resistance fighter. In Iraq we're not fighting enemies but making enemies. As Richard Clarke and others have observed, every dollar, bullet and American life that we spend in Iraq is one that's not being spent in the war on terrorism. Every Iraqi, every Muslim we kill or torture or humiliate is a precious shot of adrenaline for Osama and al Qaeda.

The irreducible truth is that the invasion of Iraq was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of American foreign policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep watching.”

An Iraqi girl blogger wrote advice to Americans on May 7th from Baghdad

·        “ don't rape, don't torture, don't kill, and get out while you can -- while it still looks like you have a choice. . . . Chaos? Civil war? We'll take our chances -- just take your puppets, your tanks, your smart weapons, your dumb politicians, your lies, your empty promises, your rapists, your sadistic torturers and go."

When Bush and others insisted war would make us safer, how enlightening it would have been if a reporter would have confronted them with what Ike had to say about that notion:

·        “There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for absolute security, but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in attempting to reach that illusory goal through arms alone.”

When Vice-President Cheney and Wolfowitz said that a limited nuclear war was winnable, someone should have told them Ike didn’t agree.

·        “Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The demand for it by the hundreds of millions whose chief concern is the long future of themselves and their children will, I hope, become so universal and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere, can withstand it.”                                                           

and

·        “If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.”        

Along the same lines, General Bradley said:

·        “The world has achieved brilliance without conscience.  Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”                                                    

And General MacArthur said:

·        “We have had our last chance.  If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door.”       

When the administration, the media and even Congress were so quick to condemn France and Germany for not backing Bush’s war, had they listened to Eisenhower, they might have at least considered the possibility that the people of those nations were right:

·        “If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.”

Before so cavalierly sending other people’s children off to die in an unnecessary war, they might have remembered what Ike, who never got over the loss of his own child, had to say about that kind of heartbreak:

·        “There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child.    Things never get back to the way they were.”

Or Rudyard Kipling, who after his son died in World War I – a war he had initially supported – said in remorse for that support:

·        “If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.”

When Bush, and others began speaking of more or less eternal war against our “enemies” I wish someone would have let them know they were not the first people who had espoused that idea.  Another war leader had trumpeted much the same concept when he said in the "International Conciliation," the publication of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: 

·         "And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. . . . War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it."

The person who made that Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Perle/ sounding statement was the father of fascism himself, Benito Mussolini, who also said

·        “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and Corporate power.”

The media’s failure to even examine the economic incentive for war might not have happened had they read the words of Albert Pike who said:

·        “A war for great principle ennobles a nation.  A war for commercial supremacy, upon some shallow pretext is despicable, and more than ought else demonstrates to what immeasurable depths of baseness men and nations can descend.”

Cheney’s association with Halliburton and Bush, Sr.’s ties with the Carlyle Group should have given knowledgeable journalists pause for thought had they simply remembered what Ike said in his farewell address:

·        “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist”

Or the words of one of only two two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winners, Marine Major General Smedley Butler who figured out seventy years ago that :

·        “War is just a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

      A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses… of course it isn’t put that crudely in wartime…  It is dressed into speeches about patriotism and love of country and putting one’s shoulder to the wheel, but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket and are safely pocketed.”                                                                                                                                                                           

There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-NationalisticCapitalism…

I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”

General Butler was a “colorful” character.  He did not believe in war for corporate profit, but my take on the man is that had he still been alive he would have been the first in line to fight after Pearl Harbor was attacked. 

I wish he and Ike would have been alive two years ago to talk some sense into Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz.  But then again, I think if General Butler would have been left alone with Bush, he would have taken the ignorant little warmonger into a closet and beat the snot out of him.  He would have considered Bush one of the “domestic enemies” it was his duty as a soldier and a patriot to guard America against.

Ike as well as Butler both also recognized the true cost of concentrating on a military solution to all our problems.  Ike spoke about this in his farewell address when he said:

·        Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.   This world in arms in not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.  

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron…  

What can the world, or any nation in it, hope for if no turning is found on this dread road? The worst to be feared and the best to be expected can be simply stated.                                                                                                                         

      The worst is atomic war.  

·        The best would be this: a life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and       the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

·        To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.   Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Roman Historiab 55-117 AD,                                                                                                                                  

            I leave you with one final quote directed at this administration, who in their eagerness to control the world and to garner contracts for their corporate campaign contributors never wanted any solution to the Iraq problem but war,  and for the broadcast media, who in their eagerness for the increased ratings they knew a war would provide, failed to do their job, which is to question the seats of power and to hold them accountable for their actions.  In their timidity they also failed  to look out for the people – the soldiers who would be sent to their death and maiming for corporate gain, and we taxpayers – especially those among the middle class -- who will be made to pay for it all.  To them and to all of us General Omar Bradley said:

·        “War can be prevented as just as surely as it can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent it must share the guilt for the dead.”

Bio:  Lonna Gooden VanHorn is a mother of six and a grandmother.  For the past two years since the drumbeat for war with Iraq began, she has been a freelance writer, with articles in Opednews, Not My President, Not My War Crimes, Bush Watch, OMMP, Dems Online, Indy Media, Big Time Patriot,  Critical Tolerance, and various other sites on the net.  Born and raised on a small farm in southern Minnesota, she has lived in Emmetsburg, Webster City, Anamosa, and Sioux City, Iowa, as well as Ohio and Illinois.

She now lives in New Mexico with her husband, Joe, a veteran born in Estherville, Iowa, who spent 18 months in Vietnam.

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