To: George W. Bush
and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
From: Tomas Young
I write this letter
on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War
veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who
died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of
veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical
and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely
wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life
is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of
husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a
parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters
and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans
who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose
trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in
Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines
who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the
some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write
this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind,
those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunger and finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans - my fellow veterans - whose future you stole.
I write this
letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I
think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies,
manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because,
before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands
of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with
hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are
and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each
guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including
the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you
stole.
|
Your positions of
authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations
consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your
character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged
the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard
unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not
willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of
young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought
than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army
two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been
attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my
fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no
part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors,
much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or
to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what
you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join
the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by
Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3
trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war.
Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I
was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the
largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power
in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in
Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and
terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every
level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was
you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay
the consequences.
I would not be
writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those
forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would
still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but
I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence
of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my
bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the
fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including
myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies,
for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions
of empire.
I have, like many
other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care
provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled
veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no
interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We
were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of
being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and
selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian
ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do
to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours
will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes,
that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many,
many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends,
as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before
the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg
for forgiveness.
No comments:
Post a Comment