We can end the witch hunt because it’s been found in the person of Iowa House Speaker Linda Upmeyer.
I had hoped our first female speaker would be different from other politicians. Those hopes were dashed as she proved herself otherwise in pandering to the sizable Iowa veteran population.
In her May 19 legislative newsletter she wrote as if it were for FOX News,
With Memorial Day right around the corner, I encourage everyone to take a moment to reflect on the service and sacrifices that our veterans and active duty members of the military make each and every day. Please also take some time to recognize those that protected us and kept us safe who are no longer with us. It truly takes a special kind of person to put their country and others above themselves and for that we thank each and every member of our armed services, past and present. Thank you for your service and I wish everyone a safe and happy Memorial Day.
Nuts to her. It’s not Memorial Day.
Had Upmeyer made her statement in support of Armed Forces Day, which was the next day, it wouldn’t have caught my attention. President Truman led the effort to establish a single holiday for citizens to come together and thank our military members for their patriotic service in support of our country. In that context, Upmeyer’s statement may have been appropriate. Instead she politicized military service.
I take offense to Upmeyer’s thoughtless muddle because it casts a polite if patriotic fog over the fact of increasing militarism under President Trump. Not only is our country considering ramping up our 15-year war in Afghanistan, fighting a proxy war in Yemen through Saudi Arabia, and working to isolate Iran, we have forgotten the fact that real people serve in the military and put their lives at risk for this failing foreign policy. Under the 45th president there will be more war dead.
The purpose of Memorial Day is to honor men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military. It’s not to thank veterans for their service. It’s not to thank currently serving military staff. It’s not to reflect personally about highway safety or being happy. Those are political calculations. Memorial Day is to participate as part of a community in honoring our war dead.
One hopes that is something most Americans can agree upon.
Civilian control of the military is an American value our president doesn’t appear to share.
A report last Friday from the American-led military coalition in Iraq indicated scores of non-combatant civilians huddled in basements for protection had been killed in U.S. bombing raids with as many as 200 casualties.
During a 2015 interview on NBC, candidate Trump made his intentions regarding Islamic State and their assets clear.
“With ISIS, you kill them at the head. You take the oil,” he said. “That’s where they’re getting their money. If you bomb the hell out of it, you bomb the hell out of it. You’ve got to stop their wealth. They have tremendous wealth.”
It is one thing to destroy the economic assets of the Islamic State and quite another to kill civilians as coalition forces attempt to drive them from Mosul.
The official government position is that rules of engagement with enemy combatants have not changed with the new administration. At the same time, coalition partners indicate the rules have been relaxed. In the fog of military explanations the truth is obscured.
If the report is true, we know why. It’s because the president turned our wars over to his generals and shouldn’t have. The president’s disregard for civilian control of the military is evidenced by the fact the Congress had to pass a law to enable former Marine Corps General James Mattis to become Secretary of Defense.
Our president should be hands-on when it comes to our wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. There is little evidence he is and innocent people are paying the price.
My 1975 enlistment in the U.S. Army had everything to do with how screwed up the military was coming out of Vietnam. I asked myself, if regular people didn’t step up and fix the mess, who will?
I almost didn’t get in.
Enlisting for OCS (Officer Candidate School), the people who interviewed me before signing me up said, “If he washes out of OCS, then he’ll serve six years enlisted.” They said that right in front of me.
Perhaps my shoulder-length hair didn’t indicate “officer material.” I suspected then, and now, the reason they gave me a chance was because I met the qualifications on paper and they had a quota to fill during a time when public sentiment toward soldiers was as low as we consider Washington lobbyists, corrupt politicians, rats and blue green algae today.
I got in and breezed through basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina on the infamous “Tank Hill.” I remember standing at attention in front of our barracks with some of my mates while General Omar Bradley, the “G.I.’s General,” was driven by in the back seat of a car.
Next was Fort Benning, Georgia for OCS where the company commander tried to ditch me, drug testing me almost daily for a while. Even if I was a user, how was I supposed to get illicit substances when locked up on base for the first eight weeks of training without visitors? Regretfully, I brought some No-Doz with me from Iowa, which was discovered and confiscated (I think) during one of the repeated inspections of my personal gear. I made it through OCS and was commissioned a second lieutenant, with Mother coming down to pin on my gold bars. It was a big deal at the time.
From Benning I took leave and drove home in my brand new pickup truck. A half dozen of us newly minted lieutenants went to the car dealership in nearby Columbus to leverage our buying power. It was a brand new yellow Chevy Luv. After a week or so at home, I drove to Charleston, South Carolina, stopping overnight at a high school friend’s home in Terre Haute, Ind. My vehicle was loaded in Charleston to Bremerhaven, Germany, and I flew to Frankfurt am Main, arriving at my unit in Mainz-Gonsenheim just before the Christmas holiday.
I was assigned to a mechanized infantry battalion as a platoon leader and swear every soldier assigned was either on drugs or selling them. One-by-one people were caught and sent home or to the stockade. On Friday nights I remember catching people using heroin and running them down to the Military Police station. The charges almost never stuck, and if they did, when the soldier was released, he was required to see a drug counselor. It turned out the counselor was also a drug dealer.
In Germany we did most of our practice maneuvers in the winter to minimize what was called maneuver damage to the German countryside. Soldiers used every excuse possible to avoid going out for the sub-zero degree training. It turned out a group of them was dealing drugs and pimping prostitutes across the street from the base. The ring leaders needed trusted lieutenants to stay back and tend the business.
I served three years as an officer, becoming a company executive officer and battalion adjutant, and then got out. I liked the military because one always knew where one stood in the social pecking order. We wore that on our sleeves. It was some of the hardest work I ever did. I felt fully engaged in trying to do something positive for our country.
The mess I encountered didn’t get straightened out until later. I could see the beginnings of it from the group of officers coming to Europe from TRADOC. The unstated mission that everyone knew was to transition the Army from it’s post-Vietnam condition into a force with operational tactics designed to fight for oil in the Middle East.
Things were getting tense in Iran toward the end of my tour of duty. Evacuations had already begun through nearby Wiesbaden. When I asked a group of officers for a volunteer to go to Iran, no one raised their hand. As we used to say, “the balloon was about to go up.” Less than a month after I returned to Iowa, 52 hostages were seized at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
I don’t understand veterans recognition in the 21st Century. Everyone thanks veterans for their service if they know he or she served. At the grocery store there was a sign in the window advertising a free breakfast for veterans on Nov. 11. Do they think we can’t afford to make our own?
I’m sure they mean well, but to me, it is one more thing on a list of grievances with the rampant militarism and imperialism that characterizes the United States today. I didn’t defend my country for a free meal on Veterans Day.
Whether my military service was a success or a failure, I don’t know. I’m glad I served. It’s what somebody who is a nobody, just clay going to clay, can do to serve a greater good.
We can better thank veterans by taking care of their trauma from serving… and by giving peace a chance.
Doctors group releases startling analysis of the death and destruction inflicted upon Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan from the “War on Terror” in Body Count.
WASHINGTON, D.C.– On March 19—the 12th anniversary of the onset of our country’s ill-fated military intervention in Iraq—Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) released the latest edition of Body Count for North American distribution.
The report, authored by members and colleagues of the German affiliate of the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), is a comprehensive account of the vast and continuing human toll of the various “Wars on Terror” conducted in the name of the American people since the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
This publication highlights the difficulties in defining outcomes as it compares evaluations of war deaths in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Even so, the numbers are horrific. The number of Iraqis killed during and since the 2003 U.S. invasion have been assessed at one million, which represents five percent of the total population of Iraq. This does not include deaths among the three million refugees subjected to privations.
Dr. Hans-C. von Sponeck, UN assistant secretary general and UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq (1998-2000) calls the report, “a powerful aide-mémoire of their legal and moral responsibility to hold perpetrators accountable.”
“With the U.S. and Canadian governments now poised to escalate its military involvement in Iraq and Syria to counter the real and exaggerated threat posed by ISIS, the lessons of Body Count can contribute to a necessary conversation regarding the extreme downsides of continued U.S./NATO militarism,” said Robert M. Gould, M.D., Physicians for Social Responsibility. “Hopefully it can help the North American public better understand the links between the devastation caused abroad and the escalating military budgets that lead to increasing detriment of our communities and social fabric at home.”
Body Count takes a clear and objective look at the various and often contradictory—reports of mortality in conflicts directed by the U.S. and allied forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The result is a fuller picture of the devastation and lethality to civilian non-combatants throughout these regions. Unfortunately, these deaths have been effectively hidden from our collective consciousness and consciences by political leaders seeking to pursue military solutions to complex global issues with little, if any, accountability.
Body Count underscores the scope of human destruction that helps fuel widespread anger at the Coalition Forces. It similarly provides the context to understand the rise of brutal forces such as ISIS thriving in the wake of our leaders’ failures. After an estimated cost of at least three trillion dollars over a decade of warfare, we need to fully account for our responsibility and learn the appropriate lessons to avoid a tragic exacerbation of the explosive situation we face today.
When you won election as U.S. Senator with 588,575 votes, I decided to step back from criticism of my government, just as I did when I entered the U.S. Army during the Ford Administration. That’s what soldiers do, or at least did during the difficult times of reorganizing our military after the Vietnam War. The lessons I learned then serve now in our partisan and toxic era of politics.
Your signature on the recent Tom Cotton letter to the Islamic Republic of Iran was unneeded, counterproductive, and some say treasonous. As a former member of the U.S. military, I expected more restraint from meddling in ongoing international negotiations from a field grade officer in the Iowa National Guard.
I’ve read the letter and it reflects a type of audacity with regard to the Iranian leaders that has no place in international affairs.
Your tampering with the negotiating process with Iran served no useful purpose to Iowans who seek a world with less war and less nuclear armed states. Luckily the current negotiations are based upon resilient foundations and inoculated against such blatant political posturing.
I urge you to represent my Iowa views and support the administration’s negotiations to bring Iran’s nuclear program into compliance with their obligations under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
I also hope you will pursue with equal vigor, fulfillment of the U.S. obligations under the Non-proliferation Treaty.
IOWA CITY— My skills at ordering a beer failed to keep up with the times. We were meeting at a bar in the county seat, one recognizable from infrequent visits for meetups over 40 years. I arrived first and took a seat at the bar.
“What do you have on tap?” I asked. The trouble began.
Expecting the bartender to name two or three brands manufactured by large brewers, she handed me a menu with a long list of draught beers.
“Do you make any of them here?”
“No, we don’t.”
Distracted when I saw two modern-day hipsters drinking tall PBRs a few feet away, I said to myself, “it’s not that simple any more.” I should have ordered one of those.
The bartender stood waiting, then left while I pondered.
Memories came. Of the Chief Tavern on Seventh Street in Davenport where I went when things got a bit rowdy where I rented a room during the summer of 1975. I’d take a book, walk the half block, and nurse a beer at the bar, reading and waiting for things to quiet down at home.
“Do you have pilsener?” I asked when she returned. She did.
As U.S. Army officers in Germany, we secured cases of Pilsner Urquell through the U.S. embassy in Prague. It was hard to get the Czech beer in the late 1970s, although the brand is widely available today— even in our rural Iowa town.
Resolved that pilsener shall be my standard order to avoid having to memorize ever changing options. Keep things simple and cope with change.
A few minutes later she brought a tall glass with an inch and a half of foam. I paid six dollars and a buck for a tip, and nursed the beer until my friends arrived.
Our local chapter of Veterans for Peace was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that gave congressional authorization for the war in Vietnam. It is a resolution we now know was premised on a falsehood. It is not news that in war, truth is the first casualty.
The most powerful part of the event was the witness of five members of our chapter who are Vietnam veterans. I tried recording the speeches, but my device shut down when some of their voices were softer than its range of perception.
Tom Kelly
Former marine Tom Kelly spoke of black ops in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, something we knew at the time was going on. The reality of his experience spoke louder than his voice ever could.
“I did things I’m not proud of,” he said, wearing a ball cap commemorating his veteran status as a marine. It was sobering to hear his words as the sun set on a beautiful Iowa summer day.
None of the Vietnam War needed to have happened. The American deaths and injuries; the far greater number of Vietnamese deaths and casualties. It did happen, and as the memorial at the court house is inscribed, “all gave some; some gave all.” It is not only about us.
Our country’s propensity for war, and the deceptions and falsehoods about it, make determining what to do more challenging than ordering a beer could ever be. It seems critical that we move on from our personal problems to effect change. In a society possessed of personal choices, our government is on a course of militarism that could jeopardize all we hold dear.
To say I am glad to know the veterans in our group couldn’t be more true. To say we can continue with our nationalistic pandering to the gods of war is the lie. One we can’t afford to repeat as we sustain our lives in a turbulent world.
IOWA CITY— I dropped off a check at the Waterfront HyVee last night to reimburse the airfare of Daniel Hale, a veteran who worked with the armed drone program in Afghanistan, to come to Iowa. When I arrived, a group of about 25 people had just partaken of pizza, lemonade, coffee and crudités.
It was the beginning of a gathering of Veterans for Peace and Catholic Workers to protest the U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle program. Saturday at 10 a.m., there is a demonstration at the Iowa Air National Guard base in Des Moines. Monday, Saint Patrick’s Day, dozens of Midwest Catholic Workers are expected to commit nonviolent civil disobedience during a second protest at the base. The events have been well choreographed, and it’s not the first rodeo for most of the folks expected to participate.
Hale spoke of his experience in Afghanistan as an intelligence soldier, focusing on a particular mission where one target was killed, along with four other people. He had no idea whether the four others were combatants, even as the military identified them as such. What he described was consistent with other narratives about how drones are used. The event was life changing for him, and should be for the rest of us.
We’ll see if the corporate media covers the story, and importantly, whether the demonstration makes a difference in U.S. policy toward drones.
LAKE MACBRIDE— From Nov. 11, 1919 until June 1, 1954, we commemorated Armistice Day with a moment of silence to recognize the 20 million who died during World War I. A second moment of silence was dedicated to those left behind. Beginning in 1954, All Veterans Day replaced Armistice Day as an official U.S. holiday to honor all veterans, and has become a time to pay tribute to our perpetual wars.
I appreciate the thank yous for my service, however, the better effort would be to work to reduce the number of military veterans being produced through adjusted national policy. On days like today that is heard almost nowhere.
I’ll head to town to participate in the Armistice Day observance organized by Veterans for Peace, and work toward that end. That will have to do for today.
I took your poll regarding what the United States should do about the violation of international law and crime against humanity that was the chemical weapons attack in Syria. The choice of answers in the poll seemed to lead us to war, and nowhere else.
The choice between an air strike or none, is a false choice. The chemical weapons attack near Aleppo was a crime and the perpetrators should be brought to justice in the International Court of Justice. Period.
As a member of congress, one hopes you have more direct insight to the circumstances of this attack, and by whom it was perpetrated. As a citizen, it is not clear to me who did what to whom, and that makes it difficult to say what the U.S. should do about it.
What is particularly disheartening is the United Nations report released by Russia this afternoon, which indicates the makeup of the chemical weapons used in the attack were not from the Syrian chemical weapons arsenal. The report suggests the possibility that the chemical weapons were used by the rebels supported by the United States. If this U.N. report, and Russia’s analysis of it is accurate, there is even less basis for launching an air attack against Syria.
I trust you will consider these matters when making you decision on how to vote on an air strike on Syria.
(UPDATE: Sept. 4, 2013, 3:30 p.m. CDT: A new report from Russia, including a 100-page United Nations report on the chemical attack at Aleppo, Syria, indicates non-standard Syrian chemical weapons used in attack. Russian analysis suggests Syrian rebels may have launched a chemical attack, rather than the Syrian government. Click here to read more).
The horrific use of chemical weapons in Syria is a violation of international law and a crime against humanity. President Obama was right when he said, “in a world with many dangers, this menace must be confronted.” Where he was wrong was when he said, “the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.”
A couple of things don’t matter about the American response to Syria’s use of chemical warfare against its citizens.
The commentary from the right is the usual anti-Obama anything parade of made up crap. Former U.N. ambassador John Bolton said to FOX News, “the White House candy store is open,” meaning the Syria vote agreed by Democratic and Republican leadership in the U.S. house and senate will become yet another round of congressional political swaps of votes for pork. Some on the fringe even say Obama is using Syria to distract from fake scandals in his administration. The whining voice of the right and its fringe don’t matter because the public is tuning in.
President Obama differentiates between an aerial bombardment and boots on the ground. Only the most cynical or naive among us don’t understand these are two aspects of the same thing. He said, “our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope.” All wars are, and this one would be no different in that regard.
What matters, that isn’t being said much, is as my colleague at Physicians for Social Responsibility, Dr. Robert Dodge, wrote in the Huntington, W.V. News, “the military intervention being debated is not intended to end the violent conflict that has killed more than 100,000 Syrians. It won’t help the nearly two million Syrian refugees return home or get the more than 6.8 million people in need access to humanitarian aid.” These are real people with real needs, and little assurance that an American air strike will benefit them in tangible ways. Our recent and costly invasion of Iraq stands as an example of how U.S. military adventurism does little for people outside a small group of war profiteers.
It must be tempting to think U.S. intelligence knows where Syrian weapons of mass destruction are located, enabling the targeting and destruction of their government’s capabilities. But things go wrong, more often that we would like.
Individuals in the Syrian government committed a crime when they used chemical weapons against a group of Syrian citizens that included children. We have courts to prosecute such criminals, beginning with the International Court of Justice. The International Court of Justice is where this crime should be confronted.
An invasion of Syria, and that is what a target air strike would be, would perpetrate more violence in an already war torn country. Iowans may be able to tune out the world for a while, but we must resist what our government does in our name. For my part, I join with the Quakers who wrote, as one of 25 non-governmental organizations, this open letter to President Obama reiterating the notion that war is not the answer:
August 28, 2013
Dear President Obama,
We, the undersigned organizations, are writing to express our grave concerns with your reported plans to intervene militarily in Syria. While we unequivocally condemn any use of chemical weapons along with continued indiscriminate killing of civilians and other violations of international humanitarian law, military strikes are not the answer. Rather than bringing an end to the violence that has already cost more than 100,000 lives, they threaten to widen the vicious civil war in Syria and undermine prospects to de-escalate the conflict and eventually reach a negotiated settlement.
In the course of more than 2 years of war, much of Syria has been destroyed and nearly 2 million people- half of them children- have been forced to flee to neighboring countries. We thank you for the generous humanitarian assistance the US has provided to support the nearly 1 in 3 Syrians- 8 million people- in need of aid. But such assistance is not enough.
As the U.S. government itself has recognized, there is no solution to the crisis other than a political one. Instead of pursuing military strikes and arming parties to the conflict, we urge your administration to intensify diplomatic efforts to stop the bloodshed, before Syria is destroyed and the region further destabilized.
Sincerely,
Friends Committee on National Legislation
American Friends Service Committee
Church of the Brethren
Code Pink
CREDO Action
Democrats.com
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Global Ministries of the United Church of Christ and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Historians Against the War
Institute for Policy Studies
Just Foreign Policy
Oxfam America
Peace Action
Peace Education Fund
Physicians for Social Responsibility
Presbyterian Church, USA
Progressive Democrats of America
RootsAction.org
Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence
United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society
USAction
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Veterans for Peace
Voices for Creative Nonviolence
Women’s Action for New Directions
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