by TOMAS YOUNG
Tomas Young was an American soldier who was wounded in Iraq fighting for, supposedly, his country. This is a letter he wrote to Bush and Cheney some time ago. So much of it could equally apply to the other "leaders" who rahter than "leading", actually "followed" the US President and his VP into an illegal war in the hopes of preferment with the West's most powerful men.
Clearly I refer mainly to Tony Blair and his cabinet (including someone who hopes to play an important role in the life of Scotland...Jim Murphy). However the Spanish and Italian right wing prime ministers are also to blame.
The letter moved me.
Mr Young was dying when he wrote it; dying from the injuries he sustained in that war. He died on Monday of this week, a day before Veterans' Day in the USA and Remembrance Day in the UK.
The war criminal Blair soiled that Remembrance Day event in London by his attendance, taking a short time off from the moneymaking he has dedicated himself to since demitting office.
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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.
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.
-Tomas Young
RIP Mr Young.
