Today marks the fifth anniversary of Bush's speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where he stood beneath the now infamous Mission Accomplished banner and announced, "my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."
Half a world away, my soldiers and I were preparing our rucksacks to head to Baghdad.
I remember preparing our soldiers and expecting that our Commander in Chief would be providing a plan for our "peace keeping" mission. I had been led to believe that we were going to be part of a "Phase IV," which meant that we would be "engaged in securing and reconstructing" Iraq; the very words used by our president when he addressed the sailors in front of the Mission Accomplished banner. I, like so many soldiers and civilians, believed he was telling us the truth.
As Thomas Ricks, in his book Fiasco, and many others have now proved, he was not.
There was no plan for securing. There was no plan for reconstructing.
Lieutenant Colonel Alan King recalls, in What Was Asked of Us, that as he rolled into the Baghdad Airport "they told me I had twenty-four hours to come up with a reconstruction plan for Baghdad." You read that correctly. A Lieutenant Colonel on his way to Iraq, was given 24 hours to "come up" with a plan.
Unfortunately, the mission was far from accomplished. The mission was never defined. How can an army accomplish a mission when no one decides what the mission really is? This is failure of leadership on the largest scale imaginable.
We mark the fifth anniversary of that publicity stunt, with the following;
- April marks the highest death total for US Troops in 2008.
- Over 4061 American fatalities
- Hundreds of thousand Iraq casualties
- Over 300,000 troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with MAJOR PTSD
- Estimates put the war cost at over $3 TRILLION.
- NY-26th, the district where I am running for Congress, continues to pay over $1.9 Billion alone.
- As a direct result of the war, oil and gas prices have skyrocketed, pinching families and pushing our economy toward recession.
These numbers are where we stand now. You know they will continue to grow.
Our brave men and women in uniform have done everything we have asked of them over the last five years. They struggled to do their jobs in a war with no strategy for success. They continue to serve with inappropriate equipment, insufficient training for the situation, and a lack of leadership coming from Washington. They have even returned for 3 or 4 tours of duty, only to suffer through more of the same.
Unfortunately, Washington continues to fail our troops by insisting there is a military solution to this all too political problem. They are failing to address the real issues; pressing religious, economic, and social solutions that could help stabilize the region and return a sense of pride and productivity to the lives of every day Iraqis.
In short, the mission needs to finally be defined.
Our new mission is to bring our troops home safely, securely, and soon.
This election is about embracing our new mission. It's about ending our military engagement, and about beginning a political engagement.
To achieve our new mission, America must return "leadership by example" to the world. And that means implementing strategies to address the following:
- The tragedy of hundreds of thousands of veterans coming home to a broken Veterans Administration
- Engage the millions of moderate middle-class Iraqi refugees who have lost their homes and are at risk to becoming recruited by radical elements
- Reform our approach to national security so that our military is not the only tool we use to solve political problems
- Bring accountability to the war profiteers and criminals who have fleeced our taxpayers and stolen from our troops
- Begin a diplomatic surge to engage the entire region of interested parties to help solve centuries old ethnic resentments and struggle
And that's just the beginning.
I am running for Congress so that we can finally address and accomplish our new mission, to bring leadership by example back to this world...not the phantom leadership that was so cavalierly alluded to from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln five years ago.
I need your help so we can get to Washington to bring the real leadership and real change necessary to get our country back on track.
Your new mission; sign up to support candidates across this country who will work to bring our troops home safely, securely, and soon. Together, we have the power to change Washington.