While waiting in a doctor’s office quite recently, I idly picked up a magazine to read while I waited for the doctor. Like many waiting rooms, there wasn’t much of a selection. I chose to pick up the May 2006 issue of VFW. This magazine is published by the Veterans of Foreign Wars for their membership.
An article written by Tim Dyhouse, VFW Magazine’s senior editor, immediately captured my attention. In February of 2006, Mr. Dyhouse was embedded in the Missouri National Guard’s 110th Combat Engineer Battalion. This is one of the battalions in Iraq whose primary mission is to search for and destroy IED’s (Improvised Explosive Devices).
According to the article:
‘The battalion’s nearly 500 men and women comprise four companies and a headquarters staff based at three locations. The 110th’s staff officers and Headquarters Company are at Baghdad, after moving from Tallil in March.’
“ The center of Iraq’s population is Baghdad, and that’s where the enemy’s munitions and orders come from,” said Lt. Col. Mitchell Passisi, the 110th’s commander.”
What exactly does their job consist of, and what do they do? Again, their primary job is the location and safe detonation of IED’s. Baghdad and other major cities are nothing more or less than a continual minefield. The Iraq terrorists are smart. They are waging a battle we cannot win. They are waging a battle with a strategy far beyond that waged in Korea and Viet Nam.
Korea was pure guerrilla warfare. Viet Nam was guerrilla warfare at it’s most intense. Combat veterans from these two wars know quite well what it is like to fight an enemy you cannot see, and one you cannot tell from the indigenous population. The concept of this type of conflict was unimaginable and impenetrable to the American battle mindset of Johnson & Co. That is why we were forced to withdraw in those wars.
There is no honor in mindlessly destroying American lives in a hopeless, civil conflict. The biggest difference between WWs I and II and our latest wars is that we were not attacked as a nation in Korea, in Viet Nam and now, Iraq. We entered the Korean and Viet Nam conflicts because of NATO and other post WWII treaties with our allies. The war in Iraq, however, is something shamefully new – we have attacked a nation that had not attacked us. If we attacked anyone, it should have been the home country anf political refuge of Osama bin Laden, the country of Saudi Arabia. Oh, wait. They are our allies, right?
But Iraq isn’t Korea or Viet Nam. This is a new game, one in which the body count is fast approaching 1,500,000 civilian and military dead.
The war in Iraq does share some grotesque similarities with the wars in Southeast Asia. My husband’s friend, a decorated Viet Nam Veteran with a Bronze Star, told me about a young, orphaned Vietnamese girl-child who was adopted and looked after by his platoon. These kind-hearted Marines clothed her, fed her, made sure she was safe and warm. They took great delight in teaching her to swear in English. She was the camp mascot, their little foreign daughter. Her favorite American food was chocolate.
One day, this little child walked up to a group of Marines. They hugged her, petted her and were teaching her to play Tic Tac Toe in the dirt of the compound. My husband’s friend had to wash out his socks before night patrol, so he left the group. As he was gathering his laundry to begin his wash, an explosion caused everyone in the compound to hit the dirt.
It wasn’t incoming fire. This little girl, their adopted daughter, their ‘pet’, had pulled the pin on a grenade hidden under her little dress and blown up herself along with seven of the Marines in the group. She was Viet Cong.
That was just one incident in Viet Nam. Our forces did not, could not tell Vietnamiese from Viet Cong. In my friend’s words, ‘They all looked and sounded alike.’ Trusted advisors turned out to be Viet Cong, time and time again. Villagers, old, young, male and female could be ‘friendlies’ and then turn right around and actually be ‘Gooks’. This was a war we could not win. We did not win in Viet Nam. We pulled out, and we brought our boys home. Viet Nam survived. It is not a democracy, but it survived.
But how can you win a war when there is no one to shoot at? How can you win a war when your enemy fights by hiding a gasoline-filled shell hidden inside a dead human body? The insurgents in Iraq know that American soldiers will stop and check every body they find, for humanitarian reasons. They count on American soldiers’ concern for the living and their compassion for the injured and dead. They have us figured out; trust me on that.
One day, a stretch of highway in Iraq will be cleared of IED’s. The very next day, or even that same night, the next patrol will find old tires, piles of garbage or rubble, a bundle of clothes or bodies that were not there before. Our soldiers learned the hard way that anything not there the first time around is probably booby-trapped. If our troops have learned this lesson, they have learned it the hard way. We now have well over 3,000 dead American soldiers to prove it. How many have been physically maimed? I haven’t been able to get those figures.
Mr. Dyhouse says:
“IED’s are the deadliest weapons in the enemy arsenal, accounting for more than two-thirds of all hostile U.S. deaths in Iraq in the last half of 2005. Between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2005, Pentagon statistics show that 368 uniformed Americans were killed by enemy action. Of those, 251, or 68%, were killed by IED’s. During that period, an additional 19 GIs died by suicide car bombers, seven from landmines and three from “explosions.”
All told, these deadly devices had claimed 739 GIs’ lives by March 18, 2006. Last year, IED’s inflicted 72 % of all wounds on Americans”
Let me repeat this for clarity: 72 PERCENT OF ALL WOUNDS INFLICTED ON AMERICANS ARE CAUSED BY IED’S. They are NOT inflicted in face-to-face combat – these people do not engage our forces in ‘traditional’ combat. They know full well they possess the winning strategy by waging this war with IED’s.
Although some are, the majority of these IED’s are not primitive devices. Many of them are triggered by remote control, sometimes using circuit boards from cell phones. This allows the IED’s to be triggered by an Iraqi hiding nearby in a house, behind a pile of rubble or some other camouflage. The most frustrating thing for our forces is this fact of Iraq law: Unless the perpetrator is caught in the act of detonation, whether in person or on tape, they cannot be charged with any offense. They cannot be charged, and they cannot be tried for their acts. Iraqi law prohibits it.
How can you fight this enemy, this type of warfare? How can sending an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq change anything in this senseless, hopeless quagmire/nightmare brought on us by courtesy of the lies of the American President?
We cannot win here. All George W. Bush is doing is trying to save face by offering up for slaughter an additional 40,000 0f our sons and daughters on this insane field of battle that is not a battle. He is sending our children out into this insane minefield called Iraq.
Given these cold, hard facts, straight from Iraq and the Pentagon itself, how can Bush and his top military advisers continue to knowingly and willfully kill your children?
Because someone has to protect the no-bid oil contracts of Haliburton. Your children are being blown to bits so Cheney and friends can pocket more millions from Iraqi oil.
This is why there is a near-total blackout of war coverage on television and in print. Do you remember the live coverage we had of Viet Nam? Right there on the six o’clock news, right there in our faces, coverage of our brothers and sons being killed or maimed for life in another senseless conflict we had no business being in.
I’ll give Bush & Co a great deal of credit for one thing. They learned from Viet Nam that in order to continue to wage an unpopular war, you have to keep the faces of our American dead and the agony of our wounded hidden from view. Our government censors any and all media coverage of our injured, our wounded, our maimed and even our dead children. No cameras are allowed to photograph the coffins of our American dead being unloaded onto American soil for burial. George Orwell was right. This is ‘1984’, and Big Brother has a name. George W. Bush.
Only one American publication has been able to obtain and print photos of our wounded soldiers in Iraq. That publication is the ‘National Geographic’. The editors of NG, under the guise of doing a story on military medicine, were granted permission to publish photos of some of our wounded in the December 2006 issue. This is one of the few publications able to show the true cost of George W’s war of lies.
I listened intently as the President addressed the nation the other night. I heard nothing new. It was just the same old song and dance – “Stay The Course.” All he wants to do is throw more of our children’s lives away for nothing. There is nothing the new Iraq government can do to stop the primary weapon of war, the IED. Our American soldiers are doing all the dirty work. Even fully trained, a unified Iraqi National Army could not combat this type of warfare.
How much longer must we stand in solitary support of the new Iraq Democracy we have created by force and destruction? How and when will this ‘fledgling democracy’ be able to fully unite and govern its’ own people? If Iraq is truly a new democracy, then let’s do it the democratic way. Why don’t we ask the people of Iraq if THEY want us to stay? I’d bet good money that if that this question was put to the ballot in Iraq, there would be no opposition to voting of any kind, no one would be in fear or danger of his/her life on that Voting Day. They would in all likelihood flood the voting booths if they thought that their vote would stand even a minute chance of causing us to leave.
How long will we ‘enable’ the new Iraq Democracy to survive? When a child learns to walk, it falls down quite a few times. Parents who rush to pick baby up find out the hard way that baby soon learns it doesn’t have to learn to walk when the parent is there to carry it. One thing I learned in my years of counseling substance abusers is that the first thing you have to eliminate is the ‘enabler’, the one who provides the alcoholic with alcohol. We have enabled the new Iraq government to delay facing the real problem with this new government, the problem of ‘just getting along’.
If the people of Iraq truly want to be a Democracy, they will unite and form one. We have taught them as well as we can by force how to be a democratic nation. President Bush points with pride to the new governing body of Iraq. That’s all good and well. They can do it, but only if it is what they themselves really want. What if the majority of the citizens of Iraq don’t want a Democracy? What if their religious and social beliefs are so deeply embedded that they will willingly return to a religious dictatorship as soon as we leave? You can’t convert people at gunpoint. Only the Iraqi people know what they want. They can unite and come together. Their united nation-wide support of their soccer team proved it.
You think the embryonic Iraq ‘Democratic’ leaders do not know this? They knew full well that the assurances and promises they made to Bush were just for his Presidential address of the nation. They know the truth – you cannot fight those you cannot see. This war cannot be won, and they allowed themselves to be used as mouth puppets by Mr. Bush in an effort to, once again, play on the fears of our nation. In his ‘State of the Union’ address, he got in six mentions of 9/11.
“Wolf!”, Mr. President, “Wolf!”. How many more times will you cry, “Wolf!” Enquiring minds want to know.
Mr. Dyhouse further states:
“It’s frustrating for them (American soldiers) because there is no human enemy at which to strike back. With IED’s, terrorists fight by hiding in bushes or homes near the road, triggering a bomb and running away. It requires none of the courage displayed by American soldiers, who would be more than willing to fight it out face-to-face.”
It is this last sentence that tells me why Dubya cannot win this war. Our troops are still being trained in the anachronistic battle styles of World Wars I & II. In those wars, the enemy would stand up and fight you man-to-man They wore different uniforms and spoke different languages. Their spies were fairly easy to trip up with obscure American trivia questions. It was easy to spot an enemy sympathizer in these wars. They usually made no secret of whose side they were on.
We did not learn a lesson from Korea. We did not learn a lesson from Viet Nam. We cannot win this type of war! Our generals in charge of this war still think our training is adequate for this new type of non-engagement war. Have our training methods changed in the least bit to include knowledge of and ability to triumph in this type of warfare? No. Because it can’t be done. You cannot be trained to fight those you cannot see.
Ask a Veteran of Iraq yourself. Most of us know one by now. I have spoken with several Veterans of this war. 95 % of them have told me the same thing: They had no clue as to what they were actually getting into, and their training did not address any successful way in which to effectively engage the enemy. The insurgents are fighting THEIR war, and we are fighting OUR war, and they are winning theirs.
Most frightening of all is a Commander-in-Chief who possesses a total blindness to truth that can be classified only as ‘pathological’ in nature. His naked statement blaming himself ‘for any mistakes’ was a coldly calculated attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public. It turned my stomach. Enough is far too much of enough. No one is buying this. Not Congress, not the American public, not the rest of the world.
According to the January 13, 2007 edition of the Roanoke Times, in an article from the Associated Press, our allies are ‘bugging out’. They are leaving. The Italians are gone. The Slovaks are getting ready to leave. Great Briton wants to start getting out along with the South Koreans and the Danish troops. Let them leave. All along, they have been too smart to actually mix it up with the Iraqis. Most of the paltry 15,857 troops from 25 other nations (compared to 132,000 American troops) are in noncombat positions as it is. They have decided to take their marbles and go home. This is not their game. I can’t blame them.
Has this critical information penetrated the protective curtain of yes-men and power brokers and superrich advisors that cocoon and cushion Mr. Bush’s tender sensibilities? It has not. Now he wants to take on Iran. Heaven help us. Our King James Bible, which Mr. Bush is so fond of claiming he is familiar with, proclaims that, “There are those who have eyes to see and cannot see; ears with which to hear and cannot hear.”
Hear me, Mr. President. Hear me loud and clear.
Bring our children home. Now. All of them.
Stop trying to fight this war you started with American attitudes, with American training, with American methods. It cannot be done. The Veterans of Korea and Viet Nam will tell you the same thing. This war cannot be won. No one can win a war when there is no one to shoot at. We are and will continue to be a nation of brainwashed idiots if we allow this to continue. The bottom line is this: we have been duped into this war by a man who has avoided any actual combat by the diplomatic immunity of the superrich just because Saddam Hussein threatened to kill his daddy.
Mission accomplished, Mr. President.
By unhappy coincidence, I watched a movie this afternoon. I’m sure most of you have seen it. It is called, ‘War Games’. It was made in 1983 and starred Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman and Ally Sheedy. The premise of the story line was that the kid, played by Broderick, hacked into a NORAD computer and engaged our top defense computer, WOPR, pronounced ‘Whopper’ into what he thought was an innocent video game. It turned out to be ‘Global Thermonuclear War’. The computer thought the war game was real, and began trying to unlock the codes to our nuclear missile sites in order to launch a strike. Ultimately, the kid, along with the creator of the computer, was able to stop the imminent nuclear war by convincing the computer of one unassailable fact:
“The only winning move is not to play.”
Let’s take our marbles and go home.
Tags: ambush, american troops, bush, guerilla warfare, ieds, iraq, lost cause, president, suicide bombers, War, wmds
