The Cost of Escalation
Fallen youth at Arlington National Cemetery.
By Dana Goldstein
Thursday January 11, 2007
Last night, President Bush appeared before the nation to announce an escalation of the war in Iraq. The wrongheaded and tragic policy of deploying an additional 22,000 active duty troops has been widely referred to as a “surge,” which implies a temporary change in policy. But what Bush has outlined is an escalation—yet another open-ended, naively optimistic, and foolishly narrow-minded strategy, when what is required is a firm time-line for the United States’ commitment of troops, as well as a shift from a mostly military strategy to a new focus on negotiations among Iraqi factions and diplomacy in the region. That is the approach favored by the Iraq Study Group, numerous veterans and active duty soldiers and officers, and—perhaps most significantly—the American people, who just two months ago elected a new Congress in large part because a full 72 percent of the public now opposes the war in Iraq.
To assume, as Bush stated last night, that an additional 22,000 troops will “secure Baghdad” by “clear[ing] neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents” is to ignore the now almost universally-acknowledged truth that Iraq has spiraled into civil war conditions in which it is practically impossible for American soldiers to distinguish between friend and foe. The fear and death that define life in Iraq is the work not of a small, contained group of “pro-Saddam” insurgents, but the result of widespread violence caused by sectarian strife and opposition to the American occupation—an opposition that is sure to grow along with the increased military presence Bush proposes.
Beautiful ocean waves surge. Intractable conflicts escalate.
This photo essay portrays the cost of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy—a cost that will only grow dearer under the President’s escalation plan. Section 60 at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia houses the freshest-dug graves of Iraq war veterans, some as young as 18-years old. Some graves, only a few days or weeks old, are temporarily marked until headstones are erected. Inside a visitor’s center, a memorial to Iraq veterans depicts photographs, paintings, drawings, and notes from loved ones. The names of the dead demonstrate the diversity and strength of America. They are a stark reminder of the dedicated young people who have paid the ultimate price for this ill-conceived, incompetently-pursued, needlessly-prolonged war.
Click any thumbnail to view a larger version. Information on the fallen soldiers is provided by ArlingtonCemetery.net.
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Comments
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King George and his administration are despicable and must be held accountable for the fiasco in Iraq. That said, we need young adults to step up and protest this travesty.
— Ed - Jan 11, 03:52 PM - #I am inclined to believe that George W. Bush is a genuinely stupid man who sincerely believes genuinely evil things that he does not understand, plus some dangerous things that he does understand, although most of humanity, including most Americans, don’t believe. For example, I seen it reported in detail (e.g. in Mother Jones magazine) that he is a ‘Christian Reconstructionis’, i.e. he believes that, not only is the Apocalypse at hand, but that it is also the duty of True Christians to do all they can to hasten Armageddon.
The important thing to understand is that his foreign policy is given to him by some dangerously clever men who generally are not Christian Reconstructionists (or even Millennialists or even fundamentalists) but who believe evil things that they may or may not understand are evil.
In the 2000 election, Bush took an isolationist stance and essentially had no foreign policy until he took office and was given one by members of the Project for the New American Century. These people believe that the United States should use its military superiority for economic advantage.
Consequently, before the 2000 election, they planned the conquest of Iraq in order to establish it as a platform for projecting American power into the entire region.
Given the global concensus that was the moral foundation for the creation of the United Nations, i.e. that the only legitimate war is defensive, the clearly non defensive purpose of the PNAC goals is clearly immoral and illegal under international law.
It is nothing more or less than imperialism, an evil that was the cause of two World Wars and which the world seemed to be evolving beyond with the end of (at least European) colonialism in the 1960’s.
While too many Americans oppose this war simply because we’re not winning it (or not winning it fast enough), and politicians confine their objections to how it is being fought, rather than why it is fought, the fundamental issue is imperialism itself.
The decision facing America is whether to continue to try to cling to an unsustainable deadend consumerist economy dependent on imperialism, rationalizing barbaric violent world domination with obscene perversions of our claimed national ideals – or whether to accept the obligations of moral maturity by rejecting the evils that we have long denounced in others.
— G.P. Franck-Weiby - Jan 12, 06:05 AM - #World Can’t Wait calling for
100 Teach-Ins Across America!
“The world faces a grave emergency. The very nature of U.S. society and its relationship to other countries are being reshaped in a horrific ways before our eyes. Yet the full implications of these sweeping changes are not widely understood, even among those who oppose the Bush administration. This must change and resistance must grow.
The electoral defeat of the Republican majority in Congress revealed the widespread revulsion against the Bush administration and the Iraq War. The Bush administration remains in office, however, and the foundational elements of the Bush program remain either openly promoted or untouched by the new Democratic Congressional leadership.
If ever there was ever a need for people to deeply understand the reality that we still confront, IT IS NOW.”
— World Can't Wait - Jan 15, 09:02 PM - #