I Am Sullied - No More

Mostly I don't do political posts, but now and again I feel that I must. The media are taking note of the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War. "War. What is it good for?" What do we have to show for the four years but thousands of dead and wounded on both sides of the conflict and a destroyed country. My own country is suffering from a kind of death by a thousand cuts.

Every day I check the numbers of killed and wounded in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at Iraq Coalition Casualty Count. I say a prayer for the dead and for the families and friends of the dead and for the wounded and their families and friends. But the numbers don't portray the reality of the killings and maiming. The numbers count real people.

Yesterday the Baton Rouge Advocate published a tribute to the troops from Louisiana who have been killed in the Iraq War, which included pictures. They number 72 as of today. That brought the consequences home more than just the numbers, but, of course, the reality of the losses are borne by the families and friends of the fallen. The online version, unfortunately, does not include the pictures, just the names and home towns.

Last night a non-political candlelight vigil was held in Baton Rouge to commemorate the deaths of all the troops in the US, which number now stands at 3217.

AlterNet posted a link to a story of one of the fallen from The Texas Observer that caught my eye:

Ted Westhusing was a true believer. And that was his fatal flaw.

A colonel in the U.S. Army, Westhusing had a good job teaching English at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He was a devout Catholic who went to church nearly every Sunday. He had a wife and three young children.

He didn’t have to go to Iraq. But Westhusing was such a believer that he volunteered for what he thought was a noble cause. At West Point, Westhusing sought out people who opposed the war in an effort to change their minds. “He absolutely believed that this was a just war,” said one officer who was close to him. “He was wholly enthusiastic about this mission.” His tour of duty in Iraq was to last six months.

About a month before he was to return to his family—on June 5, 2005—Westhusing was found dead in his trailer at Camp Dublin in Baghdad. At the time, he was the highest-ranking American soldier to die in Iraq. The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command report on Westhusing’s death explained it as a “perforating gunshot wound of the head and Manner of Death was suicide.”

He was 44.

....

When he was in Iraq, Westhusing worked for one of the most famous generals in the U.S. military, David Petraeus. In January, Petraeus was appointed by President Bush to lead all U.S. forces in Iraq. As the head of counterterrorism and special operations under Petraeus, Westhusing oversaw the single most important task facing the U.S. military in Iraq then and now: training the Iraqi security forces.

....

...“Something he saw [in Iraq] drove him to this,” one Army officer who was close to Westhusing said in an interview. “The sum of what he saw going on drove him” to take his own life. “It’s because he believed in duty, honor, country that he’s dead.”

The officer said that “strength of character was Ted’s defining characteristic. It was unflinching integrity.” That integrity, he said, was also Westhusing’s great flaw. “To be a true flaw, the personality has to have great strength. And that characteristic caused his downfall.”

....

At about 1:15 in the afternoon, Westhusing was discovered in trailer 602A. Near his body was a note addressed to his commanders, Petraeus and Fil. Written in large, block letters, it read:

"Thanks for telling me it was a good day until I briefed you. [Redacted name]—You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff—no msn [mission] support and you don’t care. I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied—no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. I trust no Iraqi. I cannot live this way. All my love to my family, my wife and my precious children. I love you and trust you only. Death before being dishonored any more. Trust is essential—I don’t know who trust anymore. [sic] Why serve when you cannot accomplish the mission, when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness? No more. Reevaluate yourselves, cdrs [commanders]. You are not what you think you are and I know it.

COL Ted Westhusing

Life needs trust. Trust is no more for me here in Iraq."

Ted Westhusing was a casualty of this evil, stupid war just as much as if he had been shot or killed by a bomb. Why did he do this just one month before he was to return home? He was an honorable man, who believed in the justice of the war. I don't understand how anyone could believe that the Iraq War was justified, but apparently honorable people did. Ted Westhusing came to see that the Iraq War was not one that was worth fighting. I pray Ted Westhusing rests in peace and that his family and friends are healing from their great loss.

I was never a true believer in this war, because, from the beginning, there were dissenting voices to the "evidence" that the Bush maladministration presented to "prove" that Saddam was a clear and present danger to us here in the US. The dissent might have been on page 17 of the newspaper instead of page 1, where it belonged, but it was there.

Current members of the Congress, both Republicans and Democrats, who supported the war, are rushing to declare their outrage in being sucked into that support by the lies of the Bush maladministration. Perhaps some of them were fooled, but others knew, as well as I and many others did, that the intelligence leading up to the war was flawed, yet they were too frightened to oppose Bush at the time.

A few days ago, I learned that I had free access to New York Times Select because my husband is retired from the local university and retains a small cubicle and an email address there. Their columnist, Frank Rich, wrote recently in The Ides of March 2003:

...That’s why a revisionist history of the White House’s rush to war, much of it written by its initial cheerleaders, has already taken hold. In this exonerating fictionalization of the story, nearly every politician and pundit in Washington was duped by the same “bad intelligence” before the war, and few imagined that the administration would so botch the invasion’s aftermath or that the occupation would go on so long. “If only I had known then what I know now ...” has been the persistent refrain of the war supporters who subsequently disowned the fiasco. But the embarrassing reality is that much of the damning truth about the administration’s case for war and its hubristic expectations for a cakewalk were publicly available before the war, hiding in plain sight, to be seen by anyone who wanted to look.

Rich quotes from a piece from the Washington Post from March 16, 2003, by Walter Pincus, that actually was on page 17. I knew there was a reason why I kept using that number:

Despite the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden, according to administration officials and members of Congress. Senior intelligence analysts say they feel caught between the demands from White House, Pentagon and other government policy makers for intelligence that would make the administration’s case ‘and what they say is a lack of hard facts,’ one official said.

Frank Rich is right.

Here's the link to Rich's column, but you can only get to it if you have access to Times Select.

I was drawn to link to Ted Westhusing's tragic story to put a human face on the numbers that I read every day in this war with no end in sight.

Presently, Generals Petraeus and Fil are running the war in Iraq. It's way past time to honor the sacrifices of the dead and the wounded by bringing their brothers and sisters serving in Iraq home, beginning now.