Why We Fight - Part II

The documentary "Why We Fight" followed the story of a retired New York police officer whose son
died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. This grieving father wanted to get back at those who killed his son, "if the President said Iraq was behind it, let's get them." This father eventually had his son's name written on a bomb dropped by the marines. After all of that, however, this father
was shocked to hear Bush's sheepish acknowledgement that Iraq had no connection to the 9/11 attacks. "I'm old school, I trust my President. But if the President lied and we can't trust our President, who can we trust. The government exploited my feelings of patriotism, my feelings of a deep desire for revenge, for what happened to my son. But I was so insane with wanting to get even, I was willing to believe anything." Another person disullisioned in our national leadership and the "Wartime President."

Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski spent 20 years in the military and is recently retired from the intelligence departament of the Pentegan. She started to become disullisioned when she realized that Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush were quoting 10 year old UN intelligence to 'prove' that Iraq was amassing weapons of mass destruction. I don't know if there's a more powerful quote on the
Iraq war than this, "I have two sons and I will allow none of them to serve in the US military. If you join the military now, you are not defending the United States of America. You are helping certain policy makers persue an Imperial Agenda."

Lt. Col Kwiatkowski is likely referring to former VP Cheney, who mislead us into Iraq and whose company Halliburton became exponentially more profitable as they were paid to rebuild all the buildings we bombed in Iraq. The US amases 2 trillion in debt from the Iraq war but Cheney's net worth multiplies several times over.


One scene in this documentary brought me to tears; it was the sight of children not much older than my own son being taken into Baghdad hospitals while screaming and bleeding from all over their bodies. One Iraqi doctor said this, "Honestly, what we saw the first day of the war astonished us. And most of us doctors were in a state of anger. There were shrapnel injuries to women and children, civilians all of them were civilians. In the first days of the war, we didn't recieve any soldiers, the first group was from Dora. The wounded were civilians who were at their houses at dawn when an explosion happened."

0 out of 50 of the smart bombs dropped in the first few days of "Shock and Awe" actually hit their intended targets, despite Rumsfeld's posturing in his statement, "there is no doubt that initial strikes upon the leadership was successful. We have photographs of what took place."

A morgue director on Baghad saw it differently. He kept records of every single casualty from US bombs. He stated that 90% of the casualties were civilians, including children.

Are Iraqi children somehow worth less than American children? I don't think most good hearted Americans would think so, but we aren't aware of what happens as a result of our wars. To quote Michael D. Higgins, ?"The difference between [the generous common people of the United States] and the tiny elite who are in charge of the war-mongering foreign policy of the United States is just enormous."


Why We Fight - Part I