- For the first 30 years of my brother Sherwood Baker's
life, his mission was to be a responsible citizen. He made oaths and he
honored those oaths. This made him a loving father and husband. This also
made him a noble and committed soldier. He courageously deployed with his
National Guard unit to Iraq in 2004.
-
- For the last six weeks of his life, Sherwood's mission
was to provide convoy security for the Iraq Survey Group. He was killed
in action, providing site security for the group that was looking for weapons
of mass destruction. Mounting evidence indicates that the weapons, non-existence
wasn,t a mistake. It was a ruse.
-
- The clouds surrounding Sherwood's death became even darker
recently when I read the contents of a memo from the upper echelons of
the British government. The memo reiterates the fact that our administration
had every intention of invading Iraq in the summer of 2002. The White House
needed only to sell the idea to the American people.
-
- Prior to Congressional approval, prior to saying, "War
is the last resort," the decision had been made to go to war, regardless
of legal justification or the problems associated with the aftermath of
an invasion. The most telling quote in this memo reads, "The intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."
-
- Read the memo.
-
- My brother died scouring the Iraqi countryside not to
protect his country, but to satisfy the Bush administration's public relations
agenda.
-
- The leaders of our country politicized intelligence to
satisfy an ideology. My brother and more than
- 1,700 other soldiers have been killed as a result. Yet
I have to sift through the papers and the news channels to find even a
pulse of concern. In the wake of such disturbing revelations, a majority
of our press and populace resoundingly choose to be silent.
-
- Overwhelmingly, Americans have ceased to care about how
and why we went to war. Apathy, in the face of our soldiers, sacrifice,
seems more convenient.
-
- We cannot allow our government to simply replace the
motivations for war midstream and expect an entire nation and all its allies
to succumb to selective memory. Yet that is exactly what has happened.
-
- The poet Archibald MacLeish, who also lost a brother
in war, wrote:
-
- They say
-
- We leave you our deaths
-
- Give them their meaning.
-
- If we are to give meaning to the deaths in Iraq, we must
be willing to engage in truthful dialogue about the pretenses of war. Acquiescing
to the lure of silence and ignorance is an affront to the families and
memories of all who have fallen. It is a prescription for unending violence
and suffering.
-
- Are we so ashamed of what our soldiers have done, and
continue to do, in Iraq that we can,t even talk about how they got there?
Or are we simply ashamed of ourselves for letting it happen?
-
- We must each confront ourselves over the failures in
Iraq. For that failure is not simply the fault of our leaders misusing
suspect intelligence. Our course as a country ultimately stems from the
individual conclusion of all of us to be either complicit or resistant
to war.
-
- The government,s failure in Iraq becomes our own failure
when we substitute political rhetoric or blanket ideology for reason. It
becomes our fault when we are recklessly arrogant and willfully deaf.
-
- Our responsibility as citizens is to acknowledge and
embrace the whole truth about the Iraq War. We must look past partisanship
and hold ourselves and our leaders to the high standards of integrity that
citizenship demands. When we fail to honor that responsibility, we fail
to honor the sacrifices of our soldiers.
-
- Dante Zappala is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus
and a member of Gold Star Families for Peace and Military Families Speak
Out.
-
- © 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
|