Document text
Ashland, Oregon HOME Valley & State Sports Nation & World Opinion/Editorial Classifieds Business Columnists Local Issues Obituaries Weather Archive Revels Etcetera Backpage Hot Topics Most Viewed Forum Photo Galleries Video Readers Polls O-Zone Online Games Movie Preview Special Sections Real Estate Guide Menu Guide Shakespeare Subscribe Contact Us Rate Card Place an Ad May 23, 2006 From the RIGHT side MIKE GREEN So what? My kid can beat up your kid. If a single bumper sticker were used to sum up the sentiment held by millions of Americans who take great pride in the notion that we are the most powerful nation on earth, it might be this one: “My kid can beat up your honor student.” As a 12-year navy veteran, I’m proud to have served in the finest military known to man. But, the idea that such a military is to be used to forcibly advance political ideologies ignores the original design for which it was created … defense. Today, those brave men and women of the armed forces do not fight and die for the defense of this nation. Instead, they kill in order to advance a political agenda, designed by those who many perceive as the bullies of the world, and to help secure commercial gain in an area of the world where this nation established itself a little more than a half-century ago specifically for the sole purpose of stealing oil from a Muslim country. That’s a bold statement to make in light of the fact that many men and women are sacrificing time away from families and risking their lives following orders, while believing that what they are doing is good and honorable. The problem is that what our military is doing in the Middle East isn’t good nor honorable. The men and women of the armed forces are being lied to on a daily basis. They are being manipulated to believe that America is in a situation of “kill or be killed.” And many of those that serve in Iraq, Afghanistan and a few of the other 133 countries in which the U.S. has forward deployed our military, often wake up each day wondering if they will live to see the end of it. Even those young courageous soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines that come home, do so after having been asked to kill people. They come home completely different than when they left … forever changed. Killing people has its own ill effects upon the killer. There are certainly legitimate reasons for our military to fight. But, when the nation and the nation's leaders are at odds about the reasons and rationale behind sending soldiers to their death, the people ought to win that fight every time. Our leaders believe they are justified in asking the poor and middle-class to go to other lands and become cold-blooded killers. The consequences of such tasks seldom impact those sitting atop the Hill from which the orders emanate. Yet, the orders come and the nation's youth willing respond ... even as our leaders hedge and dodge and obfuscate when pushed to account for their irresponsible decisions. Still, our boys and girls march in the directions they are sent, destroying lives and lands as they go. Meanwhile, those that sent them are being wined and dined by highly paid lobbyists. Members of the people’s elite houses of congress, as well as those in the big White House, routinely dodge both the media’s probing questions and those posed by investigative arms of the Justice Department. And within a circle of less than 1,000 leaders holding down positions in the executive and legislative branches, each year we find the very same thing … rampant corruption. Upon the shoulders of these liars, cheats and thieves we have placed the lives of poor and middle-class brave men and women who desperately want to believe their sacrifices are worthwhile. They want to believe the lies emanating from Washington D.C. ... from the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the various secret offices of secret organizations of which most Americans are unaware. The people, as in "we, the people" want to believe that our elected leaders in congress, like Senator Gordon Smith, who returned from Iraq after visiting Oregon troops serving there and shaking hands with the new Iraqi Prime Minister, are making good decisions on our behalf. The problem is, they are not. Of the 535 members of congress not a single one has articulated the true reasons why the U.S. was attacked on 9/11. As devastating as 9/11 was to this nation, the reason we do not see continual Town Halls, community discussions, and public debates between leaders with educated individuals who have investigated the causes and conducted the research our leaders have failed to conduct, is precisely because the premise that America was the victim of an unprovoked attack is a lie. As one of many concerned Americans who support the troops by fighting to save them from the indiscriminate sacrifice of their lives, I stand ready to debate that very issue with any leader who has the intestinal fortitude to show cause that I, and many others like me are wrong about the "war on terror." It seems preposterous to any truth-seeker that a mass of people would continually place trust in a handful of leaders who have demonstrated time and again that they are not to be trusted. In the case of 9/11, the millions of Americans choose to trust known liars because so many of us refuse to accept the truth … or even take a cursory step in the direction of discovering investigating it. Rather, we ask the very leaders that placed us at risk to now provide us safety and security. The main problem preventing an all-out search for answers across America is that we would rather not think that our leaders would knowingly and willingly sacrifice American lives and choose to murder tens of thousands of innocent people an ocean away for ulterior motives. Yet, that is the unfortunate truth. And peripheral proof of it surrounds us. We see and hear evidence daily of many secret organizations going about their business within our executive branch. We get wind of secret prisons, torture chambers, abducted and detained individuals and worse. And the answer many of us give each time is that those folks must have done something wrong … because our government would never arrest innocent people. Our leaders would never authorize military strikes on civilians. Our leaders would never condone torture, secret prisons, abductions and the like. All of those things that have occurred (and many more things we don’t know anything about) must have all been done by rogue agents, which our benevolent government entrusted. America must be innocent because we can do no wrong. But the facts prove otherwise. The irony is in the fact that, while Americans believe we are such a highly evolved and intelligent society, we have regressed to the point of finding the citizens of Nazi Germany staring back at us each morning when we look in the mirror. This time the sacrificial lambs are Muslims. And what did the Muslims do to deserve the U.S. government stomping around in their lands, killing families and spreading destruction and mayhem? They fought back against U.S. and British tyranny over the past 53 years. In 1953, when the U.S. joined Great Britain in undermining the democratically elected government of Iran and taking control over Iran’s oil exports, the Iranian people fought back. But, they were continually beat down, tortured and murdered by a man empowered by the U.S. government. In 1979, after many failed revolutions, the people of Iran succeeded. They had fought back yet again and finally won. But their victory wouldn’t last long. The next year, the Iranians were rewarded for their victory by an invasion from their neighbor Saddam Hussein, who was supported by the U.S. government. More than one million Muslims died in that 8-year war, which was escalated at times by the U.S. government supplying chemical weapons, and the means by which to deploy them, to Iraq … and then also supplying Iran much-needed military weaponry and equipment at the same time. The U.S. government was involved in a terrible game of global domination that cost millions of lives. And what were the American people doing at that time? We were worried about oil prices, of course. But Jimmy Carter would address that issue. On January 23, 1980, Carter declared the entire Middle East the property of the U.S. government. He claimed that it was of “vital interest” to this nation and would be defended “by any means necessary, including military force.” There was no treaty. No congressional declaration. No movement by the American people. Just a single decision made one man. Surely, there were others involved in that decision. How many of them can you name? Yet, it was one of the most important turning points in this nation's history. Had the American people truly paid attention we would have witneesed how our government boldly instigated wars, undermined governments, supported secret regimes, aligned this freedom-loving nation with brutal dictators and sent Americans to die in the deserts of the Middle East. For the sake of an aggressive all-out pursuit of oil. We can talk until the cows come home, but it will be mighty tough to defend such a declaration made by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Carter annexed the Middle East and made a decision to kill anyone and everyone that got in our way. In 1980, what had the Muslim world done to deserve such a declaration? It had successfully resisted U.S. aggression through the people of Iran. It has won back its country that had been controlled by the U.S. for 26 years. But its victory would not last long. In 1981, Reagan began carrying out the “Carter Doctrine” when he took over the Oval Office. The alliance with Saddam was already solidified. The invasion of Iran was set in stone. And what did the Muslims of Iran do to deserve such a death sentence? They had merely fought back. In America, we call it defense. Despite the world condemnation of Iraq’s invasion of Iran, one member of the UN Security Council stood fast on the side of Iraq’s aggression toward its neighbor. That was us … cohorts and accomplices with the bumbling butcher of Baghdad. Today, we point an accusing finger at Saddam while yelling, “Bad man! Bad man!” If Saddam is bad for the atrocities he committed in the 80's and 90s, what does that make us, who provided him with the means to conduct such horrific acts and befriended him throughout? But even Saddam couldn’t stomach our “friendship” once it became public in the mid-80s that the U.S. was supporting both sides in a war that was initiated by Iraq … with assistance from the U.S. government. And what did the U.S. do after Saddam cut his puppet strings? Within 8 days of spouting platitudes of friendship in the palace of Saddam Hussein on July 25, 1990, the U.S. government was telling the world that Iraq was a threat to its neighbors and the whole world. Because of our government’s solid credibility, it mattered not that of the 192 recognized countries of the world we could muster only a tiny handful to back up our assertions and pending aggression against Iraq. The world knew what the American people did not know. Saddam was enabled to do the things he did by an American government that had absolutely no concern for the mass murders, tortures, rapes and human rights abuses he committed routinely. The world knew that before Saddam, America had done the exact same thing with the Shah of Iran against the Iranian people. But, despite sweet words we were whispering in Saddam's ear in the last week of July 1990, in the first week of August, America told the world that Saddam was a bad man and, of all the nations in the world, it was up to us to stop him. Less than 3 months later, the U.S. government had made a decision in a secret room of the White House to invade Iraq under the guise of “liberating” Kuwait. That was October 30, 1990. And where was this world “coalition” at that time? And what had the Muslims in Iraq done to deserve 500,000 U.S. troops invading their land? They had trusted the U.S. government on July 25, 1990 when a U.S. president said the U.S. government had “no opinion” on Arab to Arab conflicts that were going to take place between Iraq and Kuwait over a border dispute that Saddam laid out in detail to the U.S. ambassador.. And what did the Muslims of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan and other Islamic lands do when 500,000 U.S. troops desecrated the holy lands of Mecca and Medina, and used it to launch an invasion of a neighboring Muslim nation? They fought back through an organization known as The Muslim Brotherhood. And when did the American people realize our nation was at war? On September 11, 2001 ... a decade later. We ignored the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the subsequent bombings in 1995 and 1996 of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. No one even asked why did we need military bases in Saudi Arabia? In 1998, the simultaneous bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya hardly raised an American eyebrow. Those whom we had offended continued to issue fatwas and edicts for the U.S. government to leave the lands of Islam in the Middle East. To this day, few Americans have ever read even one of those messages that clearly detail the wrongs in which our government has been involved on our behalf. We would listen to the liars in Washington D.C. ... yet turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to those our government has abused. But the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen stirred us a bit. Still, we weren’t interested enough to check out why our government was under constant attack for nearly a decade. But by 2001 … by the time Americans became aware that war wasn’t something we could remain ignorant of, and stand idly by while our government exercised its will in foreign lands, the U.S. government had already taken control over nearly two-thirds of Iraq for more than 10 years. Earlier this year, when protesters in America demonstrated on the presumed 3rd anniversary of the war in Iraq, it was further proof of the ignorance of the “war on terror” running rampant throughout our society. The U.S. military has never left Iraq since it established control over its skies in 1991. This year, the U.S. has been in Iraq for 15 years, not merely 3. So, what did Americans do to deserve 9/11? It isn’t a matter of what we deserved. It was a realistic reaction of people who we have allowed our government to kick around for several generations. 9/11 occurred because we ignored the truth. Our house is dirty. And we must clean it up. For too long we have maintained trust in known liars, cheats and thieves who have willingly sacrificed the lives of innocent men and women in the military, as well as those civilians lost in the attacks upon this country, that are part and parcel of a war initiated by our government … a government we continue to empower and blindly follow. But, of course, with an incredulous perspective, some maintain to this very day that our government would never do such things. Today, a 19-year-old kid wearing a uniform will be given the legal right by our government to kill a Muslim child’s father and create a widow of the dead man’s wife. She will have no method of caring for what’s left of her family. No therapist will help her and her children deal with the death and devastation that rocked her world. No welfare check will arrive in the mail. And that young man will walk away proud of what he had accomplished in the name of "democracy." The man he killed was a “terrorist” he was told. And if that young man had not traveled thousands of miles across an ocean to find that man and kill him, it may very well have been his own family someday that would witness the daily tragedies inflicted upon Iraqi lands ... so goes the mantra. That young man has to believe that story … even if it is a lie. He may even receive a medal for taking that man’s life. And in a sad twist of ironic fate, that medal may very well be given to his widow before his time is up in the deserts of Iraq. Many in this country will mourn the loss of that brave American soldier and cry out “why?” The answer remains the same. We trust in liars, cheats and thieves. And instead of seeking the truth, we accept the platitudes, denials and obfuscations offered by our leaders. And then we offer up our boys to be sacrificed on an altar of political ignorance. It is time we stopped merely pointing out that congress is a corrupt chamber and began holding each and every member accountable for the rising death toll in a war that was initiated by this nation. Is there any other issue that congress has to deal with that is more important than saving the lives of our service members? I say no. The problem today is that we have far too many citizens drinking the koolaid of political allegiance. It is time that we began to fight on behalf of those who willingly fight for us. Like parents of an out-of-control spoiled bully, we have long played an ignorant part in enabling such fanatical aggressive behavior. And since 9/11 our government child has thrown a tantrum in the Middle East. The truth is that our child had been bullying the kids in the Middle East for a long time. When the inevitable backlash hit home we ignorantly empowered our child to wreak havoc and cause even more devastation. Perhaps we ought to realize that our kid cannot beat up every honor student. And at some point, those at whom our kid has pointed an accusing finger will find a way to overcome the great odds and bring the very same violence we have allowed our child to perpetuate ad nauseam right to our very own home in a way we have never experienced or imagined. Let’s rein in our kid before it’s too late. Let's bring every one of our brave men and women serving in the armed forces home from the Middle East. To respond to this column send email to [email protected] . Only those responses containing the writer's name, city and phone number (for verification purposes only) will appear on our site. Mike Green is an award-winning columnist and author of, " The WHOLE truth about the U.S. War on Terror: answers to every question you never knew to ask ." ( www.thetruthaboutterror.com ) From the RIGHT Side is a web-only column published by the Daily Tidings. Letters to the Editor and Guest Forums should be e-mailed in text-only format to [email protected]. Please include your address and a daytime phone number where you can be reached for confirmation. Submissions cannot have run in any other publication. Letters are limited to 250 words, Guest Forums are limited to 600 words, and may be edited for length, content and clarity. --> Copyright © 2006 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers. All Rights Reserved.