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FROM: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/169/oped/What_are
_Americans_dying_for_now_+.shtml
What Are Americans
Dying For Now?
By Derrick Z. Jackson,
6/18/2003
OIL IS TO DIE for. More
to the point, oil is precious enough for the
government to send off your children, your husbands, your wives, your
partners, your brothers, and your sisters to die for.
That is a rapidly
escalating conclusion
as American soldiers continue to die at the rate of one a day in Iraq
without destruction have been found. What we do have are sniper shootings,
grenade attacks, and the deaths of nearly 50 US soldiers 48 days after
Bush said major combat operations were over in Iraq.
On May 1, Bush said,
''We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons
and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.''
Seven weeks later and
with no vile vials in hand, Bush gave a speech
Monday in Elizabeth, N.J., where he did not make a single reference
to weapons of mass destruction.
Instead, Bush
chose to distract Americans from his Nixonian erasing of his justification
for war by criticizing his critics as ''revisionist historians.''
Meanwhile, Bush's
fellow Republicans in Congress were suppressing history by fighting
any formal investigation into the possible cooking of intelligence
to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
Their job, for the time
being is being made a piece of cake by a Democratic
Party that cannot spell the term ''opposition party'' if
you spotted them all the o's and p's.
As the Republicans
sit on the intelligence,
as Democrats sit on their thumbs, and as Americans plan summer vacations
depending on the cheapest gasoline for the biggest cars in the world,
our soldiers - many of them teenagers - are halfway around the world,
taking bullets for a mission that
is rapidly losing meaning - at least the stated meaning.
Oh, yes, a lot of angry
e-mails attempt to remind us ''revisionist
historians'' that the current absence of weapons of mass
destruction really does not matter because the mass graves of Iraqis
who were brutally murdered by Saddam proves the humanitarian aspect
of the invasion was still worth it. That does
not hold up.
We went to Somalia a
decade ago for what was supposed to be a humanitarian mission, after
300,000 people died in war and starvation. We fled within months of
a failed raid by Army Rangers that ended in the deaths of 18 soldiers
and the searing photographs of the corpse of
a US soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
Back then, the call for
the United States to get out of Somalia was stunningly bipartisan. Since
the White House was then occupied by a Democrat, Bill Clinton, it
was no surprise that Republicans leaped on the sad turn of events,
with Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico saying, ''We
can't continue in that quagmire.'' Then-congresswoman Olympia
Snowe of Maine, now a senator, said, ''I cannot
express my disgust at watching on television the treatment of our soldiers....
There really isn't a reason for the US to be in Somalia now.''
The criticism was just
as blunt from many Democrats. ''If you asked all 535 members of Congress
today, almost all of them would say let's get
out of Somalia now,'' said Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.
''More and more senators
are saying, `We gave them food, we gave them medicine, and now they're
shooting at us. Let's get out,''' said Senator John Breaux of Louisiana.
Senator Bill Bradley
of New Jersey said, ''I think we ought to leave
now.'' Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia said, ''Americans
by the dozens are paying with their lives and limbs for a misplaced
policy.... Let's vote and get out.''
When it came to Somalia,
Dole asked: ''What is our purpose? What is the cost? And how long do
we stay?'' A decade later, the same question should apply. In the Iraq
invasion we lost 139 soldiers, according to the Pentagon, while
3,240 Iraqi civilians had died as of the most recent counting
by the Associated Press.
The
AP said the final toll is sure to be much higher. Now, nearly
another 50 soldiers have died in nebulous situations that range from
justifiable self-defense to dubious overreactions more
reminiscent of the shootings of American students and rioters by National
Guardsmen in the 1960s.
On May 1,
Vice President Dick Cheney claimed
that ''one of the most successful military
campaigns ever waged'' displayed to the world ''a
new American way of war.''
The new American way
is already dissolving into a disgusting result
that has grown old in the half-century after World War II - a
quagmire.
It is about time to
ask why we accept a quagmire for Iraq when we would not do it for Somalia.
Without the weapons
of mass destruction, it has to be for the oil.
Derrick Z. Jackson's
e-mail address is jackson@globe.com <mailto: jackson@globe.com>.
FROM: http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/169/oped/What_are
_Americans_dying_for_now_+.shtml
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