I woke up Friday morning to a radio voice announcing
that someone with
my same name had been killed in Iraq. Talk about
a wake-up call.
Although I have consistently opposed the unwise
2003 Iraqi invasion through letters
to politicians and the media, columns on Internet
ezines and participation in protests
since 2002, I have to admit that lately I have
tuned out the daily reports of fresh hell
coming out of Iraq. But Friday's announcement
shook me from those temporary
doldrums, making me wonder just who was this
man with my name, who like more
than 1,000 other Americans, had been unfortunate
enough to die in this offensive,
empire-building war that was started by lies.
The Bush administration callously offered little
insight into the life of Major Kevin Shea,
a communications officer in the Marines whose
last name sounds like mine, even if it is
spelled slightly different [my ancestors once
spelled their name that way, but changed it
after getting tired of people pronouncing it
"Shee"].
If it was up to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl
Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul
Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Andrew Card, Don Evans,
John Bolton, Asa Hutchinson,
Spencer Abraham and other administration chickenhawks
who used various schemes
and excuses to avoid military combat when they
were younger, only to now send other
people's sons and daughters to die in similar
situations, most Americans would never
know Major Shea existed.
His body would be quietly slipped into this country,
as so many have been before,
and be quickly buried in Arlington National Cemetery.There
is a political reason why
Bush has never attended a funeral service for
one of the 1,027 U.S. troops killed in Iraq,
about a 600 percent increase from the 148 Americans
killed in the 1990-91 Persian Gulf
conflict. There is a beyond-callous reason why
Bush to this day refuses to allow the
flag-draped coffins returning from Iraq to Dover
Air Force Base in Delaware to be
photographed by news media.
Bush doesn't want to call attention to those American
lives his shallow, selfish,
short-sighted foreign policy sacrificed, to any
negative reminders of the ultimate price
paid by others for his lies and stupidity, especially
in an election year. Bush wants to
hold onto power by any means necessary, even
if polls show that a majority of
Americans don't believe Bush deserves four more
years.
The short statement from the U.S. Defense Department
about Major Shea said that
he was killed by enemy fire in Anbar province,
west of Baghdad, where some Iraqis
have resisted the U.S. military presence that
has continued long after Bush said the
Iraqi conflict was essentially over.
Since that May 2003 statement by Bush, almost
900 U.S. troops - 87 percent of the
total number - have died. That's a lot of Americans
to die in a war that's supposed to
be over. And we don't even count the tens of
thousands of Iraqis, including children
who look somewhat like my young, part Arab-American
son and daughter, who have
died in this conflict.
I had to turn to other sources to discover that
Major Shea was tragically killed on his
38th birthday, just one month before he was scheduled
to return home. He had a wife,
a 10-year-old daughter and a 7-year-old son in
California. He frequently e-mailed his
family withphotos of him next to smiling Iraqi
children. He wanted to help rebuild
Iraqi schools.
The Washington Post reported that friends and
relatives described Major Shea as a
"caring, generous man who left a deep imprint
on people during a military career that
began at the Air Force Academy and continued
through a teaching stint at the Naval
Academy and two conflicts in the Middle East."
Like me, Major Shea was born in Washington, D.C.,
and lived in Dallas at one time.
Unlike me, he earned a master's of science degree
in electrical engineering at the Naval
Postgraduate School in California. Major Shea
enjoyed running, sailing and rugby, even
coaching and tutoring the rugby team at the Naval
Academy, where he also taught
electrical engineering. He was so popular among
students that he was voted an honorary
member of the Class of 2003.
Major Shea was sent to Iraq in February, "hoping
that the U.S. military could help the
population, and that he could help young Marines,"
the Post wrote. "His goal was to bring
them all back safe and sound," said his mother,
Eileen Shea of Washington, D.C.
In one e-mail to his parents, Shea wrote that
he didn't agree with some of the political
decisions made in Iraq, but that "orders are
orders." In another e-mail, he told his parents
that a brief satellite-phone conversation with
his son "made my day."
And now, thanks to Bush and Cheney, Major Shea
will not physically see his son and
daughter again, who will have to grow up in a
world made colder by the heartless policies
of Bush and Cheney, despite the heroic attempts
of people like Major Shea to make it better.
The Bush campaign even had Sue Niederer, the
mother of Army Lt. Seth Dvorin, who was
killed in February in Iraq, arrested on Thursday
for merely asking a question of First Stepford
Wife Laura Bush during a New Jersey campaign
event. Niederer, who wore a shirt with a
photo of her son that read "President Bush, You
Killed My Son," was actually handcuffed
and charged with trespassing, even though she
had a ticket to the event.
Niederer asked the First Stepford Wife why her
daughters and the children of other politicians
weren't serving in Iraq. "At that point, it became
chaotic and I was pushed and shoved,"
Niederer told a local New Jersey paper. "They
engulfed me. It wasn't plain, ordinary folks,
but people in suits with earphones."
The Nazi-like crowd chanted "four more years"
as Secret Service agents surrounded Niederer,
handcuffed her and led her to a police van. At
least one person at the event spoke in her defense,
saying, "She has a right to speak. She's a mother."
Strange treatment by Bush officials of someone
who gave the ultimate sacrifice, who only
wanted to ask a question. But that’s Bush’s America,
where you get arrested, shouted down
by a robotic, jingoistic, goose-stepping crowd
and accused of treason for simply asking a question.
And some Americans wonder why some compare our
country’s political climate to the early
stages of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Even Bush supporters say he lied
To those who say Bush didn't lie his way into
this war, even partisan Republicans who
voted for Bush in 2000, such as Paul Sperry,
Washington bureau chief of WorldNetDaily,
have admitted he lied about his reasons for invading
Iraq. To this date, the alleged weapons
of mass destruction that Iraq had that made that
oil-rich country an “imminent threat” to us,
that Bush used to justify the invasion, have
yet to be found. For that alone, Bush should be
voted, if not impeached, from office.
While conservatives always drone on about taking
personal responsibility, few are calling
for Bush to accept blame in this Iraq mess. Bush
and others blame faulty intelligence but
ignore how they pushed for intelligence reports
to justify their invasion plans.
Bush neo-conservative administration officials
like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz are on record
as supporting an invasion of Iraq as part of
their dreams of an American empire as long ago
as 1997, according to the Philadelphia Daily
News. In a letter to then-President Clinton
signed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others who
later joined the Bush cabal, wrote that
Clinton should invade Iraq and remove Hussein
to “enunciate a new strategy that would
secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends
and allies around the world.”
In September 2000, the neo-conservative think
tank Project for the New American Century
released a report that advocated that the U.S.
assert its military dominance over the world
to shape “the international security order in
line with American principles and interests,” push for
“regime change” in Iraq and China, among other
countries, and “fight and decisively win multiple,
simultaneous major theater wars.” Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Libby and Florida Gov. Jeb
Bush were prominent members of the Washington,
D.C.-based organization.
“The United States has for decades sought to play
a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,”
the publication said. “While the unresolved conflict
with Iraq provides the immediate justification,
the need for a substantial American force presence
in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime
of Saddam Hussein.”
The report added the U.S. military needed to be
transformed to control not just the Middle East
and other regions, but space and cyberspace,
even to the points of establishing “U.S. Space
Forces” and developing biological and electrical
weapons. This transformation would likely take
a long time “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing
event - like a new Pearl Harbor,” the authors
wrote.
In October 2002, a year after the U.S. attacked
Afghanistan and a few months before its invasion
of Iraq, a Pentagon committee recommended the
formation of a “super-intelligence body” that
would launch operations to “stimulate reactions”
among terrorists and states that supposedly had
weapons of mass destruction, according to the
Los Angeles Times. The body would prod terrorists
to action to justify attacks by the U.S. Clinton,
who many Republicans accused of wagging the dog
when he attacked bin Laden with missiles in 1998,
as Republicans were then more interested in
Monica Lewinsky than bin Laden, even said he
warned Bush before he left office in 2001 that
bin Laden was the biggest security threat the
U.S. faced. Clinton said Bush maintained that Iraq
was a bigger threat than bin Laden, according
to a Reuters article. Former Bush officials like
Paul O’Neill confirmed how focused Bush and others
were in going after Hussein in their early
months. That’s why Sue Niederer and others are
justified in saying that Bush holds the ultimate
responsibility for the deaths of their loved
ones in Iraq.
Even Republicans question Bush’s Iraq rhetoric
Recently, Bush said to a National Guard convention
that ”our strategy is succeeding” in Iraq.
At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, respected Nebraska Republican
Sen. Chuck Hagel said Bush’s claim is “beyond
pitiful, it's beyond embarrassing. It is now in
the zone of dangerous.”
Analysts who said the effort is going fine a few
months ago have now flip-flopped. Michael
O'Hanlon, a defense specialist at the Brookings
Institution and former National Security
Council aide testified to a Congressional panel
just ten months ago that the “overall effort in
Iraq is succeeding.” But this week, O'Hanlon
sang a different tune at a forum sponsored by
Brookings and the Center for Strategic and International
Studies.
“We're in much worse shape than I thought we'd
ever be,” he said. “I don't know how you
get it back.” “The bottom line is, at this
moment we are losing the war,” retired Col. Andrew
Bacevich of Boston University told USA Today.
“That doesn't mean it is lost, but we are losing,
and as an observer it is difficult for me to
see that either the civilian leaderhsip or the military
leadership has any plausible idea on how to turn
this around.”
Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the Bush
administration’s special envoy to the Middle
East and commander of the U.S. Central Command
in the Middle East in the late 1990s,
recently said senior Pentagon officials were
guilty of "dereliction of duty" for poor strategic thinking,
operational planning and ground execution. Lack
of basic equipment has been a continuous
problem in this war; the Army did not fully equip
soldiers with bullet-proof vests until June 2004,
as many soldiers had to pay for such vests themselves.
"The course is headed over Niagara Falls," Zinni
told CBS News. "I think it’s time to change
course a little bit, or at least hold somebody
responsible for putting you on this course. Because
it’s been a failure." Tom Hutchinson, 69,
a conservative retired businessman and professor
from Sturgeon, Mo., who volunteered for the Bush
campaign in 2000, recently told the
Associated Press that the war was a "total travesty"
and he may sit out the 2004 election for
the first time since 1956.
Morale among troops shows signs of lowering. Soldiers
from a combat unit at Fort Carson in
Colorado said they are being threatened to be
deployed back to Iraq unless they re-enlist for
three more years, according to the Rocky Mountain
News.
"I don't want to go back to Iraq," one sergeant
told the News. "I went through a lot of things
for the Army that weren't necessary and were
risky. Iraq has changed a lot of people."
A military study published in the New England
Journal of Medicine in July found that 16 percent
of soldiers returning from Iraq and 11 percent
from Afghanistan might suffer major depression,
anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder.
And anyone who thinks Bush is telling the truth
when he says he formed a substantial international
coalition for this Iraq war can count the relatively
tiny numbers of war dead for other countries.
The British military has reported 65 deaths,
compared to more than 1,000 for the U.S. The others:
Italy, 19; Poland, 13; Spain, 11; Ukraine, eight;
Bulgaria, six; Slovakia, three; Thailand and the
Netherlands, two; and Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia,
Hungary and Latvia, one.
We’re basically fighting this one ourselves.
More reasons not to vote for Bush
Author and columnist Arianna Huffington, another
former conservative, recently wrote an overview
of Bush's record since he took office. That included:
1.2 million more Americans have lost their
jobs without finding new ones, making him the only
modern-day president to preside over net job
losses.
The number of Americans living below the
poverty line has increased
by 4.3 million to 35.9 million, with 12.9 million
of them children.
The number of Americans with no health
insurance has increased by 5.8 million to about 45 million.
Median household income has fallen more
than $1,500 in inflation-adjusted dollars in the last three years,
and the wages of most workers are now falling
behind inflation.
The average tuition for college has risen
by 34 percent.
One-third of Bush’s $1.7 trillion in tax
cuts benefits only the top 1 percent of wealthiest Americans.
Almost half will go to the wealthiest 2 percent
of Americans.
Bush also failed to fulfill his pledge
to get bin Laden "dead or alive," traded the moral high
ground for pre-emptive war and the horrors of
Abu Ghraib, pulled out of
the Kyoto agreement on global warming, gutted
the Clean Air Act,
initiated the rollback of more than 200 environmental
regulations, backed a
constitutional amendment to outlaw gay marriages,
which would be the
first time in history a federal amendment would
be used to deny an
American’s rights and did not follow through
on his promise to extend the
assaultweapons ban.
Add to that piling up record budget deficits.
Graydon Carter, the
editor of Vanity Fair, also put together a great
by-the-numbers list at
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=557746.
So the question we often get back is: How is
Sen. John Kerry better
than Bush? For one thing, look at the two biographies
– both came from
wealthy families, but Kerry enlisted in the Vietnam
War and served
honorably, while Bush used family connections
to get out of combat and
eventually went AWOL. Kerry spoke out eloquently
against the war after it
droned on for years with little purpose, except
enriching defense
contractors, and became a prosecutor and politician
who didn’t accept money from
big PACs in his first campaigns. Bush was an
alcoholic who also snorted
cocaine at times and had to have his father’s
friends bail him out of
failed businesses.
Kerry has a record of working on issues that help
all Americans, such as campaign
finance reform, equal rights and the Family and
Medical Leave Act, while Bush mostly
carries water for his base, the super-wealthy
power elite. Kerry has read many books
all the way through and even written his own.
Bush has rarely, if ever, read a book all
the way through and had his bio ghost-written.
Kerry can speak eloquently without a
teleprompter. Bush hasn’t a clue what to do or
say when Karl Rove or Karen Hughes,
who even mouths the words for Bush behind the
teleprompter, are not around. The list
goes on.
One more reason not to vote for Bush: So the families
of Major Kevin Shea and others
can put this Iraq nightmare behind them. If Bush
somehow steals another election, there
will be more nightmares ahead in countries like
Iran and Syria, that’s for sure.
Kevin Shay [kevinjshay@justice.com] is a Washington,
D.C.-area journalist/writer.
The latest book to which he contributed, Big
Bush Lies, was published
by RiverWood Books of Ashland, Ore., and is available
in Barnes and
Noble and other bookstores across the country.