"Damn you Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Rice and Powell. The blood of those fine young men is on your hands."

How Many More Will Die

Before We Cry 'Enough'?

by David Rossie
Link Here

"He always wanted to be a soldier, even when he was little."

And that is why they joined the National Guard, for the military experience, the pride that goes with serving your state, and probably in most cases to earn a little extra money.

It's doubtful any of them expected when they joined to someday be called upon to fight in an undeclared war in a land that posed no threat to their state or country. But there can be no doubt they accepted the risk and the challenge because they were proud and patriotic. And it was not theirs to reason why. It was theirs but to ... well, you know the rest.

"War," Georges Clemenceau observed, "is much too serious a matter to be left to the military."

Right, especially when the war in question is being planned by civilians with a hidden agenda; ideologues who relied on bogus intelligence from unreliable sources telling them what they wanted to hear rather than what they needed to hear, and who consequently ignored what they were being told by those annoying generals, who turned out to be right. But so what?

So what, as it turned out, was that the all-volunteer Army and Marine units that invaded Iraq were stretched too thin from the start. And they were not greeted by grateful Iraqis strewing their paths with flowers and pelting them with sweets, as the crook Chalabi had assured the ideologues would be case.

They found no weapons of mass destruction and no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. And they found no terrorists. Not at first. Instead, the terrorists found them. Iraq became a hotbed of insurgency and a magnet for al-Qaida fighters from just about every Islamic country in the Middle East.

All of a sudden, there was nothing for it but to call on the National Guard to make up for the dearth of regular Army units, which a half-mad secretary of defense and his yes-man Joint Chiefs chairman had repeatedly assured us were more than sufficient to get the job done.

There was just one problem. The National Guard Act of 1934 made the Guard "a part of the Army of the U. S. in time of war or during a national emergency declared by Congress."

Did Congress, which has the sole authority to declare war, do so in the case of Iraq? Did it declare a state of national emergency in connection with the invasion? I'm not saying it didn't do either. Maybe I just missed it.

Granted, Bush keeps piping that he's declared war on terror, but declaring war on a concept is a little different from declaring war on a sovereign state.

Then again, declarations of war, like the Geneva Accords and international law, are outdated and irrelevant formalities to this administration.

And so National Guardsmen now make up nearly half the Army's strength in Iraq. This is the same National Guard that was a haven from a shooting war during Vietnam. Surely Bush remembers that.

The colonel of the brigade to which the Susquehanna Guardsmen's unit was attached expressed his sincere regrets over their loss, but added that their deaths left his team "even more resolved to complete the mission."

Indeed, and what is this week's definition of the mission? Not that it matters.

The original, albeit unpublicized, mission when the Iraq invasion plan was hatched more than a decade ago, was Iraq's oil, and that hasn't changed. The rest has been a tapestry of lies and disinformation produced by the administration, and swallowed by a cowardly Congress and a trusting public.

Pennsylvania's National Guard and other Guard units have sustained appalling casualties as a result. How many more will it take before the public cries: "Enough:" 4,000 dead? 40,000? 58,000?

Damn you Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Rice and Powell. The blood of those fine young men is on your hands.