At Long Last - An Honest Soldier

I suppose there had to be one in the Army somewhere...

According to ABC News:

"There's definitely a cover-up," the witness,
Sgt. Samuel Provance, said. "People are either
telling themselves or being told to be quiet."

Provance, 30, was part of the 302nd Military
Intelligence Battalion stationed at Abu Ghraib
last September. He spoke to ABCNEWS despite
orders from his commanders not to.

The Whole Article.

This man may wind up being one of the few heroes in thie mess.

Shame, Shame, Shame - The Buck Stops Where?

[[This essay appeared in a slightly different form as a Letter to the Editor in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on 5/9/2004]]

Harry Truman would be spinning in his grave over our current administration's inability to take responsibility for anything. No apologies, no explanations (well, it's someone else's fault, of course, probably those private contractors...)

I haven't been so ashamed to be an American since Iran Contra during the Reagan administration. We're supposed to be helping the Iraqis understand that the rule of law matters! All we're showing them is that power corrupts; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness continue to be meaningless constructs in Iraq (and in many other places in the world)

We ought to all be ashamed of ourselves that we have a government which behaves so abominably against the citizens of another country.



Our Tax Dollars at Work...

The Memory Hole has many depressing photos. Albarah.Net has some even worse ones (though since I can't believe what I hear from our government about Iraq, I'm still not ready to believe all of some Arabic group's propaganda...yet, anyway...).

An Athlete Who Was an Actual Role Model - Pat Tillman

While I have mixed feelings about our government's promotion and conduct of the war in Iraq, I think most of us who'd rather not see our military over there don't believe in condemning the people who've chosen to serve. And so, I find the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan this week particularly sad. [[And it was that much sadder to learn later that his death was due to "friendly fire."]]

Until the Viet Nam War, it wasn't that uncommon for public figures to join the military. Look at the hundreds of athletes, actors and musicians who fought for their country in World War II. You can't say the same about recent wars. The rich and the famous avoid military service because it's a volunteer military and they don't "have" to go.

Despite this, both Tillman and his brother chose to go into the Army to become Rangers. Pat Tillman gave up a multi-million dollar football contract to go fight for his country. Even more extraordinary - he graduated from college summa cum laude in three and a half years. How many professional athletes can you name who not only graduated from college but graduated with honors?

I hope we remember Pat Tillman. I don't think we're going to see other young and famous and rich men go to war.

Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein

So what do they have in common?

Both have a penchant for wearing military uniforms and growing facial hair.

Both are absolute dictators over small countries.

Both are irrationally demonized by the U.S. government.

Sure, we should be wary of these two, but is there any rational reason to go to war?

In the case of Fidel Castro, we've contained him for years. Despite several adventures in the early '60s, Cuba has proven to be fairly harmless. When the Russians wanted to put nuclear missiles in Cuba and the US government said "No way," the Russian government collectively blinked and nothing further happened. Rationality triumphed.

In the case of Saddam Hussein, he tried to invade Kuwait (and was thrown out decisively), murdered a bunch of his own citizens, and is suspected to be developing "weapons of mass destruction."

It's clear that the Iraqis have had some bioweapon capabilities. They gassed a few hundred Kurds for almost no reason other than to say that they could do it. But, they haven't done anything else with those weapons since the early '90s.

It's not so clear that they have nuclear weapons. It's not that easy to enrich uranium. Uranium enrichment facilities are large and easy to spot from the air. It's also not that trivial to transport enriched uranium, so it would be tough to "secretly" bring it in from another country. [[I later heard a report from an independent source (since I'm extremely untrusting about anything the Bush administration would say about Iraq) that the Iraqis probably did have some amount of enriched uranium in about 1990). And, as we've just learned from North Korea, it is possible to enrich uranium and build bombs without the US knowing "for sure" (parentetical comments added 10/25/02)]]

And how would they deliver a nuclear weapon - by the post?

They don't have missiles and their Air Force is kept pretty busy due to US monitoring of the no-fly zone.

Have representatives of al-Queda met with representatives of the Iraqi government? Probably. And have representatives of al-Queda met with other governments? Almost definitely. We don't seem to be going after other governments (beyond getting the Taliban mostly out of Afghanistan).

There is no rational reason to go to war against Iraq. While Saddam Hussein is dangerous, he's much, much more dangerous to his own people than he is to the rest of the world. Containment has worked very well, and can continue to work.[[(Comment added 2015: Sadly, the war the Americans started in Iraq destabilized the country and led to an ugly civil war. So it turned out America was much more dangerous to Iraq than Hussein had been...)]]

I keep hearing we should be afraid of Saddam Hussein. It's as if we learned absolutely nothing from September 11 - we need to be more afraid of, more wary of the enemy we cannot see. Like Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein is more bluster, someone I refuse to loose any sleep over, despite the overly-earnest pronouncements of our government.

Frankly, it's embarrassing.