For most of the last decade, I was Panther 2G, a Staff Sergeant in the US Army. I'm now a military contractor in Afghanistan, doing the same job out of uniform. I'm attached to I co, 3rd BN, 9th Marines, out of FOB Hanson, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. This is my fourth deployment since 2005. And after 10 years, I'm a little tired that we never learn.
Yesterday makes ten years from the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, a pointless, idiotic war organized by a cabal of pollyanna-sunshine optimists and warphiliac chickenhawks for the grand and glorious purpose of showing the world how incoherently angry we were at someone else entirely and providing said chickenhawks with the intellectual and emotional Viagra they so desperately needed to convince themselves they were right to dodge serving in Vietnam while they attacked people smarter than them for opposing it.
Or something like that.
It was a war I fought in, not believed in. I was in the protests before it began. I found no reason to think an Iraq already crippled by years of sanctions was capable of threatening anyone, and trusted the crowd of grifters, snake-handlers, and draft-dodgers that made up the Bush White House about as far as I could throw the Washington Monument even before they started trying to convince the world that a tinpot dictator (who'd been the US's buddy when he was fighting the next-most-recent US friend in the area that had overthrown the US-friendly Shah) was the next Genghis Khan and coming to nuke Sheboygan. I signed up anyway, after the fighting had already begun, on April 23 2003. I joined for love of country and the desire to be a good citizen thereof. I fought for the guys beside me in the unit. Some of them were assholes, some of them were idiots, some of them were the best men I knew. I would have taken a bullet for any of them. I left some of them there.
Ten years on, Iraq is no more stable than it was in 2008, after the massive 'surge', which I also fought in, narrowly diverted all-out religious civil war into merely a constant, mostly-contained bloody bombing and sectarian-polarization campaign. Just today, the anniversary itself, there was another wave of VBIEDs, suicide attacks, and assassinations across Iraq. Good luck finding much about it in the US media. They have abandoned interest in the place long before today. Nothing has changed since I last left the place in 2010. The world's biggest US Embassy is in Baghdad. It is nearly a ghost town, and the US government is about as popular in Iraq as a fart in an elevator. The region is far more unstable and awash in jihadi idiots than it was in 2003. Iraq is a shattered country that still cannot generate as much electricity as it could on March 18th, 2003.
I know two things from all this: None of the people responsible for the thousands of US combat dead or hundreds of billions of dollars wasted will ever, ever apologize or admit they were wrong at all (just see what Dickhead Cheney has been saying lately), and absolutely none of them will ever be held accountable either.
How can I be sure of this? Because we never learn. Just recently, declassified materials confirm that Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and his campaign actively committed treason by deliberately sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace negotiations to deny LBJ a pre-election political win. The fact that 25,000 more Americans would die in the next 4 years of saving face in leaving Vietnam was apparently not as important as Nixon winning the White House. Nixon committed treason, got thousands of better men than him killed in the furtherance of his ambition, and disgraced the honor of the Presidency and the entire country. He died a wealthy, comfortable man of old age in his own bed. His eulogy was delivered by President Clinton.
It should have read like this. "Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency."
Many of the same crowd went on to get their same jobs back when a brief period of deceny waned, and Regan swept them back into the halls of power. We never learn.
It appears that absent Jesus himself descending from the sky and openly condemning Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, et al to the fiery abyss, none of these men will ever face any sort of difficulty in the rest of their long, well-paid lives. I long ago stopped worrying about what the Pope has to day, but I do still hope in some corner of my soul that Hell does exist, as it being the final destination for said irredeemables will be the only justice that the spirits of Jens Schelbert and too many other of my brothers will ever know.
I'm sorry. I'm tired and its late here. Ten years gone, and I am sitting in yet another war zone, trying to push water up a rope, and paying for others' mistakes. We never learn. But somehow, I still have hope that one day we'll learn.
Crossposted At All Quiet on the Southwest Asian Front