underlining is mine
The Last Letter
A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney From a Dying Veteran
To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young
From: Tomas Young
I write this letter on the 10th anniversary
of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this
letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I
write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who
have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and
psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely
wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My
life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.
I write this letter on behalf of husbands
and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a
parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and
daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my
fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf
of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have
witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of
the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a
day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and
on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf
of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will
spend their lives in unending pain and grief.
I write this letter,
my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I
think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies,
manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter
because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and
hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my
fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the
Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may
evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war
crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of
thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.
Your positions of authority, your millions
of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your
privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character.
You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the
draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard
unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You
were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds
of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war
with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.
I joined the Army two days after the 9/11
attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I
wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow
citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no
part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its
neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to
“liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction
facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in
Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq,
which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues.
Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I
especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war.
Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in
Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq
War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the
balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal
pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use
of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the
dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military
and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr.
Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.
I would not be
writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan
against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been
wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical
deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort
of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to
defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body
filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact
that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children,
including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed
of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia,
and your insane visions of empire.
I have, like many other disabled veterans,
suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the
Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come
to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to
you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were
betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense
of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t
theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in
the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your
brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.
My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will
come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your
sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me
and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your
time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of
character to stand before the American public and the world, and in
particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.
In my humble opinion, it could not have been said better...John
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