Wars have an interesting way of stirring cynicism as time passes. The entry of the United States in the First World War was described by Woodrow Wilson, the president at the time, as the war to end wars. In other quotes, the war was termed an effort to make the world safe for democracy.
It doesn’t take much effort to hear the Bush administration making much the same claim as attached to a war that started nearly 87 years ago. According to the Bushies, this alleged war is being fought to end terrorism forever and to bring democracy to the Middle East where dictators have always ruled.
World War I is ridiculed and dismissed these days because far from wiping war out of the human condition, we still have the plague of armed combat.
World War II is treated much more kindly because Hitler in Germany and Tojo in Japan had clear plans to subdue the United States. The main comment about the Second World War is the inordinate casualties sustained by all combatants. In one week in the Battle of the Bulge, 19,000 American soldiers lost their lives in combat with the Axis Powers. Included were my St. Louis AT&T boss, Ashby Vaughn. Two others who sat next to me in that office, Bernie Wheeler and Dave Weiss, Jr., were killed the Pacific Theater of Operations. Don Meier lost his life in 1944 on Iwo Jima. Don was the first passenger in my car as we drove to work everyday – and he was the last person to leave my car in the evening. Losing those four men nearly 60 years ago made a strong impression on me then, as it does now.
The list of American dead from the Second World War always seems lost in government statistics. By my recollection, the dead exceeded 400,000. Much later, the Pentagon said that total is too high, but an accounting is still unavailable.
The Russian losses must have been at least 5,000,000. The German losses must have been equally as great. No one knows now about Japanese losses.
When losses like these are viewed from a remove of 60 years, there must be an obvious question: why?
Harry Truman termed the Korean War a “Police Action,” Before it was done, General Douglas MacArthur was fired and 54,246 American men were killed during that war. To this day, we still have about 35,000 troops protecting South Korea.
That war has a memorial in Washington, D. C. which attracts few visitors. The memorial has an Infantry platoon of American soldiers, worn out from combat and marching and from the bitter cold. The memorial graphically portrays how bone weary war can make a man. It deserves to be seen. That war should have an honored place in the history of the United States, but it is often forgotten.
The war in Vietnam is now judged to be a complete disaster. 58,229 Americans were lost in that war. In the end, Americans were forced to flee Saigon by whatever means became available.
Two thoughts about the Vietnamese War. Richard Nixon proclaimed – and his administration proclaimed – that a corner had been turned and indeed, there was light at the end of the tunnel. Any resemblance to similar proclamations coming from the Bush administration about Iraq is strictly coincidental. The war hawks, Bush and Chaney, saw to it that they were engaged elsewhere during the war in Vietnam.
There is a striking memorial to American war dead in Washington, D. C. by Maya Lin. It deserves to be visited. There is no record of Bush or Cheney visiting the Vietnam or the Korean Memorials. What a colossal pity.
Now we have the conflict in Iraq. Most students of warfare – if they have no political axe to grind – will tell you that the United States is involved in a quagmire. Even the war hawk Rumsfeld says it will be a “long, hard slog.” The Army is stretched to the breaking point. Any talk of the U. S. being able to fight two different wars in two different theaters, is no longer heard.
Field grade officers, Colonels and Generals, are anxious to have their tickets punched in Iraq so that they may qualify for promotion. Bush contends everything is hunky dory, but Bush has absolutely no military experience. Cheney, who is blamed for getting the United States into this war, has nothing to say about his forecast that the Iraqis would throw rose petals at the feet of our troops. The rose petals have bombs attached.
As this is being written, the number of American dead from combat is now at 500 or 501. According to the Army, combat wounded soldiers total about 2700. Both these numbers come from the U. S. Army. As such, it is my belief that these numbers are unreliable due to the Pentagon’s desire to minimize casualties. Some observers claim that American wounded is close to 11,000. So far, 21 soldiers have committed suicide in Iraq. Most of the deaths have come after Bush’s premature announcement on the carrier Abraham Lincoln that combat was finished and we had accomplished our mission. The families of the wounded and dead may want to ask Bush which “Mission Accomplished” he had in mind.
The steady stream of deaths shows no sign of diminishing. They will go on as long as U. S. forces are perceived as illegal occupiers of Iraq. If the situation were reversed with Arab troops occupying this country, it would be expected that every effort would be made to kill them and to evict them. Why should we expect any other conduct from the Iraqis.
The original premise for undertaking a pre-emptive war was the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction. That has been abandoned because thousands of men have been unable to find any such weapons. Bush told a television interviewer Diane Sawyer, that is made no difference to him. It was now a matter of no consequence. Just 500 men killed and hundred billions of dollars is a trivial matter to the alleged Commander in Chief.
When the weapons of mass destruction excuse began to wear thin, Bush claimed he wanted now to bring democracy to Iraq. That was a belated claim. For years, there have been oppressive dictators ruling Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two of American’s allies. Do you think that Bush aims to demand democracy in those countries or in Egypt in addition to Iraq. Don’t hold your breath.
The war in Iraq started in March, 2003. By the beginning of 2004, 500 American soldiers had lost their lives. There has been the expenditure of at least $250 Billion dollars so far. The last Bush request from Congress was $87 Billion. Bush promised there would be more such requests to follow.
With the cost of the war and with the Bush tax cuts, our children are going to ask when their taxes are raised, “What the hell went on here?” In the long, hard slog of Iraq, more deaths and more extraordinary expenses will have to be met. It is our children who will be forced to pay for Bush’s gifts to wealthy people through his tax cuts. And it will be our children who must pay for this unnecessary and unwise war. This is suicide for this country. If our kids say, “What the hell went on here?”, there will be no logical answer that can be offered. Our children are entitled to feel betrayed and to be mad as Hell – and no one can blame them.
PRO PATRIA MORI
It seems to this old soldier that the First World War took a heavy toll of talented poets. Every American school child starting in 1916, learned the poem Trees:
“I think that I shall never see,
A poem as lovely as a tree…..”
The author was New Jersey’s own Joyce Kilmer. This may be the most widely shared poem among all of American’s children. Joyce Kilmer was killed in France in 1918 at the age of 31, which is an advanced age for a rifleman.
Kilmer’s counterpart was a British poet named Wilfred Owen. Owen traced his ancestry to Welsh and English roots. Like Kilmer, he belonged to an infantry company called the Artist’s Rifles. He was also killed in France by a German machine gun only seven days before the Armistice ended the butchery. The church bells were ringing to celebrate the war’s end in his hometown of Oswestry in the west of England. During the celebration, Owen’s parents answered the door to find a telegram from the British War Department telling them of their loss. Wilfred Owens was 25 years old.
His most well known work was a dark poem called Strange Meeting. Shortly before he died he wrote in a separate work about the incivility of war. He said:
“If in some smothering dream you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth–corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro Patria Mori.”
Wilfred Owen has stated the truth about battlefield deaths. They are rarely surgically performed. They involve agony for the wounded and for the surviving soldiers and for his family.
In the final two sentences of Wilfred Owen’s untitled poem, the Latin reads that the old Lie is “It is sweet and honorable to die for your country.”
It is suspected that every man and woman serving in the Armed Forces in Iraq in combat might agree wholeheartedly with the thoughts expressed in the Wilfred Owen poem. Men from the Second World War would also endorse his views about war.
There were no children to mourn the loss of Joyce Kilmer and Wilfred Owen, so we will never know what they might have thought.
E. E. CARR
January 15, 2004
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Heavy one. Even after getting a degree in economics, it still feels pretty weird that the government spends about half a trillion dollars per year in money that it doesn’t have. I know all the reasons that this nominally okay, but I just keep thinking of that old saying: “if you owe your bank $100 dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank $100 million dollars, the bank has a problem.” I feel like “if you owe the world $13 trillion dollars, your taxpayers have a problem.” Obama certainly didn’t help things, debt-wise. God knows what Trump will do with his wall and his tax cuts.