If You Only Read One of My Posts, Please Make It This One
"I understand people being disheartened when they turn on their TV screen."
--President George W. Bush, in a press conference Tuesday, March 21, 2006
From the moment I started Blue Inkblots, I understood that I lived in a conservative area and that a large number of my readers would be conservatives, or at the very least, moderate Republicans. I knew that a lot of what I said would be considered controversial for that reason, and this is why I have insisted on putting information in my blog that was based on FACT, so that if I did express an emotional opinion, I could explain WHY. I thought my readers deserved that much.
I have also encouraged a free exchange of ideas, inviting stinging commentary from some readers who disagree with just about everything I say. That has not changed, and it will not change. As of today, I do not pre-screen any comments that are posted on this blog, although I was forced to put in a "word verification" device in order to protect my readers from unwanted spam. And I am proud that, so far, even heated exchanges have always been courteous, and that no one has resorted to name-calling or other bullying techniques, although I have been called a "Bush-basher" from time to time.
I have tried to lay to rest what I consider mythology, particularly about Democrats. For instance, not all Democrats are LIBERALS, just as not all Republicans are necessarily conservatives. There are many of us who straddle the line, leaning to the left on some things and the right on others. I think it squelches intelligent discourse to label people, and I try not to do it. There are plenty of left-wing and right-wing blogs out there who do all sorts of labeling. If anybody wants to read that stuff, they can hang out over there.
When I post a multi-part series on a current issue, you can be sure that I've spent several DAYS on that post, that it is fact-based, and that I have triple-sourced those facts from publications that run the gamut from conservative think-tanks to foreign newspapers to mainstream press.
Many of my posts have centered on the war in Iraq. It is natural that I would have an overriding interest in this subject, since I currently have five family members in active-duty military service, including a nephew and my son, both with the Marines, serving in Iraq. My nephew is there for his third deployment, my son for his second. Both young men have served in infantry units, both have been posted in very dangerous parts of the country, and both have seen combat.
My readers know that I did not support the run-up to this war, and that when my son first deployed, I wrestled mightily with whether or not you could support the warrior but not the war. My son and I, and my nephew and I, have had numerous long talks about not just that, but about their opinions, based on what they have seen and done in that bloody war.
They understand how I feel and not only do they not condemn me for it, but as this war has dragged on and they have been sent over again and again, I've seen a change in their own opinions--even though I have kept most of what I feel to myself around them. I figure they've got enough on their minds without listening to me spout off. I've been honest about my doubts to them, but I have not ranted or raved and have bitten my tongue many a time, for their sakes. At the same time, no aunt or mom has ever been more supportive of those boys, their mission, and their buddies, through cards, letters, and care packages, not to mention uncountable tearful prayers and fierce hugs.
They are on my mind, quite simply, every moment of every day. Every night, after I go to sleep, I wake up screaming. (Ask my husband.) In the mornings, my neck muscles are as rigid as an iron pipe, headaches are a daily occurrence, and unless I write it down on a post-it note somewhere, I can't hold a thought for five seconds.
Those who have not been through this in one form or another cannot begin to imagine the exquisite agony of just getting through one day. For those military loved ones who live in the city, even just the mere sound of a car door slamming in the driveway can bring on a heart-pounding blood-rushing spurt of almost overwhelming terror. For me, it's the ringing of the telephone, because I fear that the Marines would not be able to find my house. I've googled the satellite map and even I can't find it. I'm afraid they'll have to call me in order to get directions to my house so they can tell me my son is dead.
My hands are shaking, just typing this.
This is the REALITY of war.
So it is with acute anxiety that I have been watching what newspaper reporters have been referring to as the "campaign" coming out of the White House, starting with Vice President Cheney's Sunday-morning talk-show route, to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's op-ed piece in the Washington Post, to the president's speeches and congenial, charming press conference of yesterday.
The message is this:
Things in Iraq are much better than the American people have been led to believe by the news media, which stresses only violence and bloodshed and does not give adequate coverage to all the progress being made over there. We at the White House are being "realistic" when we tell you that things are getting better all the time, and if the media just covered all the good things that are happening, the American people would see that we are right, and they would support our efforts toward "victory."
Implied, and subtly suggested, is the idea that if you do NOT support those efforts, that you are, in effect, giving aid and comfort to the enemy and supporting terrorism.
This is the steady drumbeat that is coming out of the White House now, and will continue over the next few weeks as the president gives speeches designed to assuage people's anxiety and doubt about the war, and offer encouragement and a sense that our leaders are in charge, that they know what is best for us, and that even though we can't see it now, it will all be for the best someday.
And if you never read another one of my posts, I beg of you, read this:
As a Marine mother, I search every single DAY for any good news I can FIND that could ease my own considerable anxiety and make me believe that my son's sacrifices, and those of the buddies he's lost, and my nephew has lost, have not been in vain. I don't just hang out on liberal hate-Bush blogs and spout off what I've heard. I read things published by English-speaking Iraqis friendly to the United States. I read English-language foreign newspapers. I read Defense Department bulletins of successful missions and progress being made. I've spent hours discussing the war with my nephew and son and the other Marine parents I know, asking what they've seen, or what their children have seen, and what they think.
I actually asked my son if he would like for me to send him a box of candies and small toys to hand out to Iraqi children, and he said, "Don't bother. It's too late to win any hearts and minds."
I'm saying this now, and I'm saying it in BOLD-FACE, because I am BEGGING you to please not swallow whole this latest political "campaign" from the White House. I've noticed some conservative talking-heads already taking up the gauntlet--Bill O'Reilly, for instance, claiming that things look much worse because of the media coverage.
I must point out here that Bill O'Reilly has never once visited Iraq. Liberal radio commentator Al Franken, on the other hand, has visited Iraq to entertain the troops at least a dozen times, traveling to out-of-the-way places like the Abu Ghraib prison where, as he puts it, "It's not their fault, what happened before they got there. They deserve the chance to laugh as much as anybody else."
Al Franken claims he once challenged Bill O'Reilly to visit Iraq, and O'Reilly told him that he was too busy putting on a TV show. Where, apparently, he accuses the American news media of distorting the truth on the ground about a place he's never actually seen.
I have spent the past three years, and a considerable chunk of my sanity, trying to find somewhere, a reason to be convinced that my own doubts are WRONG and that there IS progress being made in Iraq. I not only followed such events as the elections over there closely, but I saved up encouraging facts about them to tell my son when he called home, so he would feel that they'd made a tangible difference with their service.
In the lives of military families, this is a LIFE OR DEATH issue.
So when my son's commander-in-chief gets up in front of the nation and blames the MEDIA for the mess HIS ADMINISTRATION has made of this entire, bloody, deadly debacle, and does it with convincing charm, or his vice-president does it with macho persuasiveness, and then I see that same media pick up the baton and dutifully run with it…I feel a despair in me so great that I can hardly bear it.
It is, quite simply, not true.
When the president repeats that we will be relying on Iraqi security forces to quell the violence, he is completely ignoring the fact that many of those same security forces are COMMITTING THE VIOLENCE THEMSELVES.
When the White House complains about media coverage of spectacular events like car bombings, it ignores the daily, ongoing, gruesome litany of assassinations, kidnappings, executions, and mass murders of Iraqi people being committed under cover of darkness where no cameras lurk.
When the "media" is criticized, nobody mentions the fact that almost 100 reporters have been murdered since this war began, almost 50 have been kidnapped, and untold others less visible than Bob Woodruff of ABC News have been horribly wounded covering daily life in Iraq.
Nobody ever mentions that most of the footage aired on American television was taken on the ground by IRAQI cameramen, because it is simply too dangerous for American journalists to travel very far from secure locations. Those who do tend to disappear, and the Iraqi journalists have to hide the fact that they work for the Americans to avoid death-threats and the kidnapping or torture of family members.
The administration's ongoing efforts to paint this war with a wide brush that is black on one side and white on the other COMPLETELY ignores the truth of the matter--that when you rip off the scab covering a deep wound of sectarian rivalries and hatreds going back thousands of years, and scabbed over by decades of sectarian repression under a dictatorship, then the blood is not going to ooze from that wound--it's going to gush, and it could bleed so badly as to cause the death of any so-called "progress" that the White House wants to claim.
Not only that, but American troops can't stop the bleeding. Like my son said, it's just too late.
In an earlier, multi-part post, I gave extensive suggestions made by moderates in both parties as to what can be done now to keep this from developing into a Holocaust. I'm not going to go back over those suggestions here.
I am going to point out one thing:
It's not those moderates, or others like them, who are in charge of Iraqi policy. It's George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld who will be in control of treating the wound THEY THEMSELVES CAUSED. For three more years.
There are mid-term elections coming up, and for the press to refer to this public-relations blitzkrieg by the White House to drum up support and soothe anxieties about the war as a "campaign" is exactly right. The White House knows they are losing even loyal members of their base on this critical issue, and they know that their own party is facing serious opposition in the upcoming elections for that reason, among others. This whole thing is designed to appeal to that base and to win back support that has bled off, and to staunch the bleeding before the Republicans lose their majority in Congress, and maybe the White House in '08.
And I am telling you, even if you never read another post of mine, that THIS IS A WAR, NOT A POLITICAL CAMPAIGN. People are dying every day, troops are spending their third and fourth years away from their families, and it's getting WORSE AND WORSE, NOT BETTER.
And THAT is "the reality," no matter what the puppet-masters say.
I have seen this kind of coordinated campaign from the White House before. As now, they did this same sort of thing in the days leading up to mid-term elections. The year was 2002, and all we were hearing then was that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and we had to destroy him before he destroyed us.
--President George W. Bush, in a press conference Tuesday, March 21, 2006
From the moment I started Blue Inkblots, I understood that I lived in a conservative area and that a large number of my readers would be conservatives, or at the very least, moderate Republicans. I knew that a lot of what I said would be considered controversial for that reason, and this is why I have insisted on putting information in my blog that was based on FACT, so that if I did express an emotional opinion, I could explain WHY. I thought my readers deserved that much.
I have also encouraged a free exchange of ideas, inviting stinging commentary from some readers who disagree with just about everything I say. That has not changed, and it will not change. As of today, I do not pre-screen any comments that are posted on this blog, although I was forced to put in a "word verification" device in order to protect my readers from unwanted spam. And I am proud that, so far, even heated exchanges have always been courteous, and that no one has resorted to name-calling or other bullying techniques, although I have been called a "Bush-basher" from time to time.
I have tried to lay to rest what I consider mythology, particularly about Democrats. For instance, not all Democrats are LIBERALS, just as not all Republicans are necessarily conservatives. There are many of us who straddle the line, leaning to the left on some things and the right on others. I think it squelches intelligent discourse to label people, and I try not to do it. There are plenty of left-wing and right-wing blogs out there who do all sorts of labeling. If anybody wants to read that stuff, they can hang out over there.
When I post a multi-part series on a current issue, you can be sure that I've spent several DAYS on that post, that it is fact-based, and that I have triple-sourced those facts from publications that run the gamut from conservative think-tanks to foreign newspapers to mainstream press.
Many of my posts have centered on the war in Iraq. It is natural that I would have an overriding interest in this subject, since I currently have five family members in active-duty military service, including a nephew and my son, both with the Marines, serving in Iraq. My nephew is there for his third deployment, my son for his second. Both young men have served in infantry units, both have been posted in very dangerous parts of the country, and both have seen combat.
My readers know that I did not support the run-up to this war, and that when my son first deployed, I wrestled mightily with whether or not you could support the warrior but not the war. My son and I, and my nephew and I, have had numerous long talks about not just that, but about their opinions, based on what they have seen and done in that bloody war.
They understand how I feel and not only do they not condemn me for it, but as this war has dragged on and they have been sent over again and again, I've seen a change in their own opinions--even though I have kept most of what I feel to myself around them. I figure they've got enough on their minds without listening to me spout off. I've been honest about my doubts to them, but I have not ranted or raved and have bitten my tongue many a time, for their sakes. At the same time, no aunt or mom has ever been more supportive of those boys, their mission, and their buddies, through cards, letters, and care packages, not to mention uncountable tearful prayers and fierce hugs.
They are on my mind, quite simply, every moment of every day. Every night, after I go to sleep, I wake up screaming. (Ask my husband.) In the mornings, my neck muscles are as rigid as an iron pipe, headaches are a daily occurrence, and unless I write it down on a post-it note somewhere, I can't hold a thought for five seconds.
Those who have not been through this in one form or another cannot begin to imagine the exquisite agony of just getting through one day. For those military loved ones who live in the city, even just the mere sound of a car door slamming in the driveway can bring on a heart-pounding blood-rushing spurt of almost overwhelming terror. For me, it's the ringing of the telephone, because I fear that the Marines would not be able to find my house. I've googled the satellite map and even I can't find it. I'm afraid they'll have to call me in order to get directions to my house so they can tell me my son is dead.
My hands are shaking, just typing this.
This is the REALITY of war.
So it is with acute anxiety that I have been watching what newspaper reporters have been referring to as the "campaign" coming out of the White House, starting with Vice President Cheney's Sunday-morning talk-show route, to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's op-ed piece in the Washington Post, to the president's speeches and congenial, charming press conference of yesterday.
The message is this:
Things in Iraq are much better than the American people have been led to believe by the news media, which stresses only violence and bloodshed and does not give adequate coverage to all the progress being made over there. We at the White House are being "realistic" when we tell you that things are getting better all the time, and if the media just covered all the good things that are happening, the American people would see that we are right, and they would support our efforts toward "victory."
Implied, and subtly suggested, is the idea that if you do NOT support those efforts, that you are, in effect, giving aid and comfort to the enemy and supporting terrorism.
This is the steady drumbeat that is coming out of the White House now, and will continue over the next few weeks as the president gives speeches designed to assuage people's anxiety and doubt about the war, and offer encouragement and a sense that our leaders are in charge, that they know what is best for us, and that even though we can't see it now, it will all be for the best someday.
And if you never read another one of my posts, I beg of you, read this:
As a Marine mother, I search every single DAY for any good news I can FIND that could ease my own considerable anxiety and make me believe that my son's sacrifices, and those of the buddies he's lost, and my nephew has lost, have not been in vain. I don't just hang out on liberal hate-Bush blogs and spout off what I've heard. I read things published by English-speaking Iraqis friendly to the United States. I read English-language foreign newspapers. I read Defense Department bulletins of successful missions and progress being made. I've spent hours discussing the war with my nephew and son and the other Marine parents I know, asking what they've seen, or what their children have seen, and what they think.
I actually asked my son if he would like for me to send him a box of candies and small toys to hand out to Iraqi children, and he said, "Don't bother. It's too late to win any hearts and minds."
I'm saying this now, and I'm saying it in BOLD-FACE, because I am BEGGING you to please not swallow whole this latest political "campaign" from the White House. I've noticed some conservative talking-heads already taking up the gauntlet--Bill O'Reilly, for instance, claiming that things look much worse because of the media coverage.
I must point out here that Bill O'Reilly has never once visited Iraq. Liberal radio commentator Al Franken, on the other hand, has visited Iraq to entertain the troops at least a dozen times, traveling to out-of-the-way places like the Abu Ghraib prison where, as he puts it, "It's not their fault, what happened before they got there. They deserve the chance to laugh as much as anybody else."
Al Franken claims he once challenged Bill O'Reilly to visit Iraq, and O'Reilly told him that he was too busy putting on a TV show. Where, apparently, he accuses the American news media of distorting the truth on the ground about a place he's never actually seen.
I have spent the past three years, and a considerable chunk of my sanity, trying to find somewhere, a reason to be convinced that my own doubts are WRONG and that there IS progress being made in Iraq. I not only followed such events as the elections over there closely, but I saved up encouraging facts about them to tell my son when he called home, so he would feel that they'd made a tangible difference with their service.
In the lives of military families, this is a LIFE OR DEATH issue.
So when my son's commander-in-chief gets up in front of the nation and blames the MEDIA for the mess HIS ADMINISTRATION has made of this entire, bloody, deadly debacle, and does it with convincing charm, or his vice-president does it with macho persuasiveness, and then I see that same media pick up the baton and dutifully run with it…I feel a despair in me so great that I can hardly bear it.
It is, quite simply, not true.
When the president repeats that we will be relying on Iraqi security forces to quell the violence, he is completely ignoring the fact that many of those same security forces are COMMITTING THE VIOLENCE THEMSELVES.
When the White House complains about media coverage of spectacular events like car bombings, it ignores the daily, ongoing, gruesome litany of assassinations, kidnappings, executions, and mass murders of Iraqi people being committed under cover of darkness where no cameras lurk.
When the "media" is criticized, nobody mentions the fact that almost 100 reporters have been murdered since this war began, almost 50 have been kidnapped, and untold others less visible than Bob Woodruff of ABC News have been horribly wounded covering daily life in Iraq.
Nobody ever mentions that most of the footage aired on American television was taken on the ground by IRAQI cameramen, because it is simply too dangerous for American journalists to travel very far from secure locations. Those who do tend to disappear, and the Iraqi journalists have to hide the fact that they work for the Americans to avoid death-threats and the kidnapping or torture of family members.
The administration's ongoing efforts to paint this war with a wide brush that is black on one side and white on the other COMPLETELY ignores the truth of the matter--that when you rip off the scab covering a deep wound of sectarian rivalries and hatreds going back thousands of years, and scabbed over by decades of sectarian repression under a dictatorship, then the blood is not going to ooze from that wound--it's going to gush, and it could bleed so badly as to cause the death of any so-called "progress" that the White House wants to claim.
Not only that, but American troops can't stop the bleeding. Like my son said, it's just too late.
In an earlier, multi-part post, I gave extensive suggestions made by moderates in both parties as to what can be done now to keep this from developing into a Holocaust. I'm not going to go back over those suggestions here.
I am going to point out one thing:
It's not those moderates, or others like them, who are in charge of Iraqi policy. It's George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld who will be in control of treating the wound THEY THEMSELVES CAUSED. For three more years.
There are mid-term elections coming up, and for the press to refer to this public-relations blitzkrieg by the White House to drum up support and soothe anxieties about the war as a "campaign" is exactly right. The White House knows they are losing even loyal members of their base on this critical issue, and they know that their own party is facing serious opposition in the upcoming elections for that reason, among others. This whole thing is designed to appeal to that base and to win back support that has bled off, and to staunch the bleeding before the Republicans lose their majority in Congress, and maybe the White House in '08.
And I am telling you, even if you never read another post of mine, that THIS IS A WAR, NOT A POLITICAL CAMPAIGN. People are dying every day, troops are spending their third and fourth years away from their families, and it's getting WORSE AND WORSE, NOT BETTER.
And THAT is "the reality," no matter what the puppet-masters say.
I have seen this kind of coordinated campaign from the White House before. As now, they did this same sort of thing in the days leading up to mid-term elections. The year was 2002, and all we were hearing then was that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction and we had to destroy him before he destroyed us.
It worked.
Don't let yourself be mesmerized by constant repetition, by charm, by forcefulness, by bombast.
Not again.
Face the facts.
And pray for my son, and all our sons and daughters over there, that they can someday see an end to the endless round of deployments to this quicksand that has so far sucked up more than 2300 lives and half a trillion dollars and untold, unimagined suffering.
I have one more quote for you:
"In the midst of the horrors of war…we have had elections…To think that here in the midst of war when the grenades are popping like firecrackers all around you, that two-thirds of the people would register and vote--and through the democratic process select people…that is encouraging. It is a very encouraging sign."
--President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968, just before the Tet Offensive that ultimately cost him his bid for re-election.
posted by Deanie Mills at 2:03 PM
2 Comments:
In Afghanistan, it is a crime punishable by death to convert from Islam to any other religion.
Just ask Abdur Rahman.
Have we accomplished ANYTHING in Afghanistan?
Anony-mouse, I appreciate your question, and I wish I could answer it in one or two sentences.
I was actually in favor of the Afghanistan invasion, and had we thrown the kind of resources and troop strength into that effort, rather than pulling them out and bogging them down in Iraq instead, we would have Bin Laden by now, either in custody or blown to bits.
We could have truly stabilized the country and done real reconstruction, maybe made some progress in getting rid of their drug export habit.
Instead, when we had the 10th Mountain group at the ready to take Tora Bora, we outsourced the job to a bunch of conniving warlords, and we lost the most famous terrorist in the world, who, unlike Saddam Hussein, played a very REAL role in 9-11.
Instead of setting the nation on sound footing, we pretty much abandoned them to be re-taken by the Taliban. (Yes, I know troops are there now, but nothing like the 130,000 we've got in Iraq.)
And here come the imams, weilding their political influence and pressure, which nearly got a softspoken converted Christian man killed in a very public way.
Have we accomplished anything in Afghanistan? As with Iraq, I want desperately to believe we have, but every time the Taliban destroys another American-built school or blows up another car bomb...I don't know.
Perhaps we should ask Donald Rumsfeld. He seems to think these difficult questions will be answered by "history." So maybe we ought to wait, oh, 20 or 30 years to ask our questions. That way HE won't have to provide any answers.
In the meantime,yes, I hope we've accomplished something in Afghanistan. But we can't just sail into an ancient culture (about which we know nothing) and impose a concept called "democracy" when they have no idea what that MEANS, and expect to see a mini-USA sprout up in the Middle East.
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