by
Chaplain Kathie
After the shock of the invasion of Iraq, the news reports we should have had all along come dribbling out. Usually these kinds of reports receive spotlight treatment after the current president has been replaced, but these reports have been surfacing for years. The problem is, too few have paid attention to them and even far less have taken a seriously look at the ramifications.
Intel official: Iraq was intel, policy failure
By Pamela Hess - The Associated Press
Posted : Tuesday Dec 9, 2008 21:00:20 EST
WASHINGTON — Gently admonishing President George W. Bush, the nation’s newly retired chief intelligence analyst on Tuesday suggested that the Iraq war was as much the failure of policymakers as it was the flawed intelligence on which they relied.
Bush told ABC News last week his biggest regret was “the intelligence failure in Iraq.”
“I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess,” Bush said.
Thomas Fingar, until this week the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, declined to directly address the president’s swipe. But he said: “I learned something a long time ago in this town. There are only two possibilities: policy success and intelligence failure.”
Fingar is in a better position than many in the intelligence agencies to assess those possibilities. Before the Iraq invasion, he was second in command of a small group of State Department analysts that notably cast doubt— albeit behind closed doors — on a key Bush administration rationale for the 2003 war.
A 2002 intelligence assessment pushed by the administration contended that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear, chemical and biological weapons program. Fingar’s office dissented on the nuclear question.
His office “got it less wrong,” he told reporters Tuesday during a valedictory round-table discussion.
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Yesterday I posted on my blog how the up armored MRAPS were delayed in being delivered to Iraq long after the intelligence reports had shown exactly what tactic would be used with IED's planted all over Iraq. This caused deaths, amputations, burns, traumatic brain injury and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
In all of this, the most puzzling thing of all is how could anyone simply dismiss all of this? It is a shock to the men and women serving to discover how little their lives were worth.
When you look into the eyes of a Vietnam veteran, especially when they are talking about how the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are treated compared to how they were treated, you see tears well in their eyes. The pain is that deep.
Vietnam veterans are not that much different from today's veterans in that they do not want to believe their country would not do everything possible to avoid sending them into combat instead of doing whatever it took to do it. Who wants to believe their lives hold so little value to the President, the Commander-in-Chief making the decisions with their lives?
We are also deluded. We believe that if we show up at airports to greet them, hold parades in our home towns to honor them, line the streets as their funeral procession passes by, we're showing how much we appreciate them. The truth is, we don't do nearly enough.
Holding the people making the decisions accountable would go a long way in beginning to really honor their lives. Anything less, is lip servicing our own conscience.
We allowed the administration to betray these men and women and we allowed them to get away with it. We allowed them to do whatever they wanted when it came to the DOD and the VA taking care of the wounded. This is the most reprehensible thing of all when it comes to us.
Claims got tied up, we complained and the VA said they were hiring more people to process the claims. When they didn't hire enough, not enough of us were paying attention to the fact they were just trying to appease us for the moment. What this did was leave wounded veterans feeling yet again betrayed.
It does not take much imagination to put yourself into their place. You just have to be willing to honestly look at how you would feel suffering for being wounded topped off with the fact you were serving the country when it happened.
When claims are tied up or denied while clearly the veteran was wounded in service to the nation, it is a knife in the back to them. They look at their wound, look at bills piling up because their wounds prevent them from working, and they wonder what support the troops really means. Is it only supporting them when they have the uniform on and then leaving them to fend for themselves when they take that uniform off? Does anyone notice a veteran is a veteran for the rest of their lives and that uniform has become part of their soul?
I will never understand the majority of the American public and how detached they really are from all of this. "PTSD? What's that?" they still ask. Doesn't matter the term was used going back to 1976 even though it was not officially termed by the government until the 80's. Doesn't matter that every generation has paid the price with physical wounds as well as this wounding to their souls. It didn't seem to matter that PTSD is a human wound and comes from a whole host of traumatic events. None of this seems to matter to them because they have their own problems, their own income issues and health issues.
The point they are missing is that while they do in fact have some very serious personal problems, especially in this economy, they miss the point they wouldn't have any of what they do have if it were not for the men and women willing to risk their lives for their sake.
When we talk about the amount of money wasted in Iraq, we talk about how our own infrastructure has suffered from neglect. We talk about all the things the American public needs but has done without. We never seem to talk about how the veterans have done without or how if just the money lost in Iraq through contractors no-bid and cost plus contracts had gone to take care of the wounded, there would be hardly no legitimate claims in backlog piles. There would be enough research done to solve a lot of their problems. There would be very few homeless veterans because the shelters would be fully funded and programs to help them would have been geared up appropriately. Outreach work would have been fully funded and no American would ever question what the term PTSD means. They would have been exposed to it so much they would use it as easily as they use the term "web site" in conversation.
There is so much we miss in all of this and we will never really fully support the troops if we neglect them when they become veterans or if we ignore what happens to them while they are serving. If we look into the eyes of a Iraq veteran or an Afghanistan veteran 30 years from now, what will we see in their eyes when they talk about how they were treated when they came home?
Senior Chaplain Kathie "Costos" DiCesare
Namguardianangel@aol.com
www.Namguardianangel.com
www.Woundedtimes.blogspot.com
www.youtube.com/NamGuardianAngel
"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation." - George Washington
