Welcome Home

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was in Iraq yesterday to say job-well-done to the last American troops coming home.  President Obama met with soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and was warmly received as he thanked them for their service.  I can only add my own humble “thank you for your service,” though it always sounds hollow to me.  Only “I’m sorry for your loss” might be more empty and pointless to the families of the fallen. 

Personally, I prefer “welcome home” to those who made it back.  It was only a few years ago that a counselor I was seeing was the first person ever to say “welcome home” to me as a Vietnam veteran, and to my own amazement, I burst into tears.  Forty years after the fact, I’m not looking for any thanks, but it’s nice that someone recognizes I was even gone.

There’s a deafening silence on this last day of our war from the likes of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the dozen or so other neo-cons who pushed us into the abyss nine years ago.  No claims of victory from them.  Are they playing golf today?  Are they ashamed of what they’ve done?  “Possibly,” and “certainly not.” 

I was so amazed at the time that still so soon after Vietnam, most Americans didn’t recognize the same mix of outright lies and gross distortions of fact that got us into that earlier pointless, doomed-to-failure and far-away war.  Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations about “weapons of mass destruction” would not have got a search warrant from a local district attorney and it failed to get an endorsement from the UN, but in we went anyway.  I couldn’t believe this was happening again, but it was, and so few others seemed to see the parallels.  The press at the time failed utterly to report on the wealth of evidence demonstrating that the neo-cons’ case was a house of cards. 

But maybe not utterly, and maybe not so few.  There actually was a large and vocal opposition to the invasion, but it got precious little coverage and it certainly never got equal time, let alone a full hearing.  At least Oregon’s congressional Democrats voted unanimously against the invasion.  They had no effect, but it mattered to me and my friends and colleagues who stood amazed as the Bush administration maneuvered public opinion over the course of months to the point where they could say they had a majority of public support.  I have never in my life seen such a distorted and intense propaganda campaign.  At the time of the invasion, a large majority of Americans believed we had an endorsement from the UN, although the best Bush could patch together was a rag-tag “coalition of the willing,” many of the willing being tiny, weak countries who depended on American foreign aid and who sent at best a handful of advisers then pulled them out a few months later. 

Four-thousand, five-hundred Americans have died, tens of thousands seriously wounded, physically and mentally.  Estimates of Iraqi deaths range from over one-hundred thousand to one million.  In any case, lots and lots of dead Iraqis.  Are the Iraqis better off now that Saddam is dead?  Is the region in any way more stable?  Have we “projected American power abroad”?  What a total fuck-up, the whole thing. 

And still, I feel enormous pride in our fighting men and women.  They were over-deployed and bore the whole burden, about one-percent of Americans at war while the rest of us sat home and were never called upon to make the smallest sacrifice. 

To those who fought the war, Welcome Home.  Thank you for your service. 

To no one in particular, we told you so.