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Monday, October 24. 2011
The End
Picking up from where we left off Saturday … Oh yes, there was a slight problem with the blog, which is why there were no photos on the last one. But, as you can see the problem has been corrected.So last week was historic. Thursday Muammar el-Qaddafi was found and executed, by a 20-year old wearing a New York Yankees cap, his bloody corpse paraded around his hometown of Surt, all to the joyous satisfaction of the Libyan people.
After 40-plus years of a brutal dictatorship, the people of Libya got their revenge. Was it justice? He got no less than what his opponents (and those unlucky enough to be in his way) got: an execution without the pleasantries of a judicial system.
There was a video, shot with someone’s cell-phone camera, showing Qaddafi being pulled from the drainage pipe, pushed around and punched and then shot. And then shot some more as the jubilant crowd pumped bullets into his lifeless body.
You know I understand why people kill other people in these situations, the joy of knowing a brutal tyrant is dead is understandable, but to revel in the actual act of killing someone, I’ve never comprehended that.
This is different than the crowd of freaks cheering Texas Governor Rick Perry for executing over 280 prisoners. The people in that audience didn’t actually have to pull the trigger, so to speak, so they are about as far removed from killing someone as a person watching a shoot’em up movie at the local cinema. It’s a lot different from being the person in the death chamber who actually pushes the buttons.
In Libya, Qaddafi’s killers took pleasure in the act and that is just appalling. As is the crowd that cheered Rick Perry. Years ago while I was still living in Milwaukee, I met a man who had survived a lynch mob in Marion, Indiana, James Cameron.
In 1982 his autobiography was published and the cover photo was of the lynching itself, showing two Black men, Cameron’s friends Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith hanging from a tree and the crowd of white people smiling and cheering, one man gleefully pointing to the hanging tree. Pictures of crowds joyfully participating in lynchings are always disturbing. I don’t get it. Why would anyone consider the killing of another person something to celebrate?Back to Qaddafi. After the United States, along with NATO (Britain and France in particular), intervened and became the rebels’ air force. President Obama chose to lead from behind, forcing France and Great Britain to take the lead. But our troops, piloting either manned or unmanned aircraft, flew more missions over Libya than any other nation. And it was our forces that provided the intelligence to get the mission done correctly.
Interestingly enough, despite the victory in defeating the Qaddafi regime, Republicans here insulted the president, one, Marco Rubio, most directly. None of them wanted to credit the president on his leadership in Libya and Rubio went so far as to thank France and Great Britain while slamming President Obama. Ironically, Rubio and his Republican colleagues consider themselves to be patriotic.
Reminds me of when the Dixie Chicks were blacklisted just for saying they were embarrassed to be from the same state as President Bush after he started the war in Iraq. I wonder why the same people aren’t up in arms over Rubio’s comments. Weren’t his comments unpatriotic? Actually, I don’t wonder why that is; their opinions on patriotism (and many other subjects) only apply when they are criticizing people with different political views.
And this little nugget: As it turns out, Marco Rubio fudged his family history to advance his political career. He claimed his family were exiles from Castro’s Cuba. Turns out, his family left Cuba two and a half years before Castro came to power. They were actually fleeing Bautista’s Cuba.
On Friday, just as the news of Rubio lying about his family’s history hit the news wire, President Obama pre-empted that story by announcing all troops in Iraq would be home by Christmas, fulfilling one of his campaign promises. I never really thought Obama should take much credit for it because all he had done was sign off on a plan first put into action by President Bush in 2008.My opinion changed though when after he had announced the plan Republicans started criticizing him for pulling out too early, for letting our enemies know our troops movements and leaving Iraq open to a take over by Iran. The harshest criticism came from Arizona Senator John McCain, one of the chief proponents of the Iraq War and one of the very few who thinks our troops should remain in Iraq indefinitely.
Long before Bush started the war in March 2003, Middle East experts were warning us that Iran would gain influence in the region and Iraq in particular if Saddam Hussein were removed from power. Even Middle East advisors from the Bush 41 Administration were warning of severe repercussions if we undertook a war with Iraq. Not to mention a civil war could occur as a result. But the neocons charged on anyway, claiming we would be greeted as liberators and our troops would only be engaged for six months.
Now, eight years and nine months later—and over 4,400 America lives lost, over 32,000 wounded Americans severely wounded, and close to a trillion dollars spent directly on this war (no one is counting the cost of care for the wounded warriors) — it is finally over. Now we can finally say Mission Accomplished.
So, after hearing Republicans criticizing President Obama for announcing the end of our involvement in Iraq, in essence completing the plan started by his predecessor, it seemed logical to give Obama all the credit. He is after all following through on the plan as he promised. And if the Republicans want to give Obama all the credit, well by golly, I’ll join them.
Senator McCain, Obama’s rival in the 2008 presidential elections, put out a press release that started: “Today marks a harmful and sad setback for the United States in the world. I respectfully disagree with the President: this decision will be viewed as a strategic victory for our enemies in the Middle East, especially the Iranian regime, which has worked relentlessly to ensure a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. It is a consequential failure of both the Obama Administration — which has been more focused on withdrawing from Iraq than succeeding in Iraq since it came into office — as well as the Iraqi government.”There’s more to it, but he never mentions this was originally President Bush’s plan for withdrawal. Nor does he address the analysis of Middle East experts who all say there is nothing more American troops can do, it’s now up to the Iraqis to decide their future. He makes the claim that no senior military officers agree with the withdrawal.
Senator McCain has been wrong about Iraq since Bush announced his intentions to start a war with that nation. The Daily Kos has a partial list of McCain’s errors and contradictions. Click Here if you’d like to read it.
But there is this lingering question: where were the Republicans when President Bush and his staff created the plan and signed the Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq? I don’t recall them being so vocal three and a half years ago.
It’s about time this war ended, this war that should have never been. It begins to close one of the worst chapters in American history, when “we” used an attack on our soil as the precept for attacking a nation that had never attacked us. Our troops suffered and died for a lie, or more accurately, a string of lies.There were no weapons of mass destruction; the pre-war intelligence had told us that. There were no links to Al Queda, pre war intelligence told us that too. It wasn’t a short war with minimal casualties, as promised by Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, John McCain, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others. It has lasted almost nine years, not six months. Twice as long as World War II.
Most egregiously, the responsibility and weight of this war has fallen to a very few in this nation: the men and women who served and their families. The rest of us were told to go shopping!
One memory I cherish though is my lovely niece Nancy, now married and expecting a second child. She is a Navy Corpsman in the Reserves, but in 2003 she went to war with the U.S. Marines. She made me proud once again to have worn the uniform … and humbled. She represents everything that is good about America. We disagree on many things, but that doesn’t get in the way of my admiration, respect and love.
Friday the president told us the end was finally in sight; welcome news for most everyone, especially the men and women who served. Let history remember them as our nation’s greatest heroes; they earned it.
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