Tell Us Why We’re At War in Iraq Again, Mr.
President
By Peter Van BurenOctober 31, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - When I was a kid, three
presidents told us we had to fight in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos,
because if we didn’t fight them over there, we’d have to fight them
on the beaches of California. We believed. It was a lie.
I was a teenager during the Cold War, and several
presidents told us we needed to create massive stockpiles of nuclear
weapons, garrison the world, invade Cuba, fight in odd little places
and use the CIA to overthrow democratically elected governments and
replace them with dictators, or the Russians would destroy us. We
believed. It was a lie.
When I was in college our president told us that
we needed to fight in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua
or the Sandinistas would come to the United States. He told us
Managua was closer to Washington DC than LA was. He told us we
needed to fight in Lebanon, Grenada and Libya to protect ourselves.
We believed. It was a lie.
When I was a little older our president told us
how evil Saddam Hussein was, how his soldiers bayoneted babies in
Kuwait. He told us Saddam was a threat to America. He told us we
needed to invade Panama to oust a dictator to protect America. We
believed. It was a lie.
The next president told us we had to fight
terrorists in Somalia, as well as bomb Iraq, to protect ourselves.
We believed. It was a lie.
The one after him told us that because a group of
Saudis from a group loosely tied to Afghanistan attacked us on 9/11,
we needed to occupy that country and destroy the Taliban, who had
not attacked us, for our own safety. The Taliban are still there.
But we believed. It was a lie.
After that we were told that Saddam Hussein
threatened every one of us with weapons of mass destruction, that
the smoking gun would be a mushroom cloud, that Saddam was in league
with al Qaeda. We believed. It was a lie.
In 2011 the president and his secretary of state
told us we needed regime change in Libya, to protect us from an evil
dictator. We believed. It was a lie.
In August 2014 the same president told us we
needed to intervene again in Iraq, on a humanitarian mission to save
the Yazidis. No boots on the ground, a simple act of humanness that
only the United States could conduct, and then leave. We believed.
It was a lie.
Now we are told by that same president that
Americans will again
fight on the ground in Iraq, and Syria, and that Americans have
and will die. He says that this is necessary to protect us, because
if we do not defeat Islamic State over there, they will come here,
to what we now call without shame or irony The Homeland.
We want to believe, Mr. President. We want to know
it is not a lie.
So please address us, explain why what you are
doing in Iraq is different than everything listed above. Tell us why
we should believe you — this time — because history says you lie.
Peter Van Buren,
a 24-year veteran of the State Department, spent a year in Iraq.
Following his book, We Meant Well: How
I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi
People, the Department of State began
proceedings against him. Through the efforts of the Government
Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren instead retired from
the State Department on his own terms.
http://wemeantwell.com/blog/