Four years of shock and awe
Rodel Rodis, Mar 21, 2007
This week’s 4th anniversary of America’s “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq reminded me of a family dinner we had more than four years ago when our family discussed whether to join an anti-war rally to protest the impending war. Our three young boys told us that they had been discussing the war in school all week and that everyone, teachers and students, were opposed to it. “Of course we’ll all go,” they said.
So off we went the next day to join the February 16, 2003 rally at the Civic Center in San Francisco. The newspapers estimated that there were 200,000 people who marched in that rally to denounce President George W. Bush’s plans to invade Iraq. Whole families just like us were there to show their opposition to the war. There were babies in strollers, pushed by their moms and dads and old folks on canes.
When my father-in-law, Romulo Austria, learned that we had attended the rally, he was upset. “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have joined you,” he said. This proud man, who was a young guerilla during the war against the Japanese, who enrolled in the Philippine Military Academy (PMA) after the war, who obtained a PhD in Engineering at the University of Rome in 1958, who worked for Bechtel as a nuclear engineer, who had been a Republican, was early on dead set against the war.
“Bush is crazy,” he told us. “It’s a lie. There are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush is just using this excuse to fool the people,” he said with firm conviction.
Papa, as I call him, turns 80 this week on Thursday, still firm in his conviction now as he was back then that the war in Iraq is sheer madness.
If Bush had listened to my father-in-law back then, there would be more than 3,200 American soldiers and more than 150,000 Iraqis still alive today. We would not have close to 30,000 American soldiers in veterans hospitals like Walter Reed struggling with inadequate health care. And we have more than $600 billion to spend on education, health care and housing for the American people. And money to fully fund the Filipino Veterans Equity Bill.
But why should Bush listen to my father-in-law when he wouldn’t even listen to his own father? In his book, “A World Transformed,” coauthored with his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, and published in 1998, former President George H. Bush explained that if he pursued the retreating Iraqi Army back to Baghdad in 1992, the United States “would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq.” That would have collapsed the international coalition and alienated the Arab members to desert the coalition. “There was no viable ‘exit strategy’... violating another of our principles,” they said.
“Furthermore,” they wrote, “[had] we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome.”
In an article published in the Wall Street Journal on August 15, 2002, Scowcroft pointed out that an invasion of Iraq “was certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism. Worse, there is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack.” Invasion of Iraq would require the United States “to pursue a virtual go-it- alone strategy against Iraq, making any military operations correspondingly more difficult and expensive ... [and] very likely would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation.” Such actions would result in a “degradation” of international cooperation, and an “explosion of outrage against us” especially in the Muslim world. Such a policy “could even swell the ranks of terrorists.”
These points seem so obvious now in 20-20 hindsight but they were obvious to my kids and to my father-in-law even back then.
When asked why he didn’t listen to the advice of his father and his father’s national security adviser, Bush told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that it was because he listens to a “higher father”. So that was his reason, God told Bush to invade Iraq just as Allah told Osama bin Laden to destroy the World Trade Center.
There was a large contingent of Filipinos at the February 16, 2003 anti-war rally we attended. The San Francisco Chronicle took note of this in its next day coverage of the rally. In the front page article (“Anti-war movement galvanizing minorities”, February 17, 2003), the Chronicle reported: “In the 400,000-strong (Bay Area) Filipino community, many have friends or family members working in the Middle East as maids and construction workers, said Rhonda Ramiro, a San Francisco resident. An estimated 1.5 million Filipinos are employed in such jobs there.”
Four years later, President Bush submits as a “benchmark” for measuring Iraqi progress whether the Iraqi Parliament will pass the Iraqi Oil Law that would allow U.S. multinational oil companies to take over Iraqi oil (“Whose Oil is it Anyway?” Antonia Juhasz, Washington Post). My son’s T-shirt was right on the mark.
“They hate us because we value freedom” Bush says again and again. We value freedom? In the last six years, Bush has eliminated many of the rights and freedoms Americans hold sacred - right to privacy, free speech, right against search and seizure, right to habeas corpus. The only right that hasn’t been touched by the Bush Administration, so far, is the second amendment right to bear arms.
What freedom is valued? Halliburton, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s company and the U.S. multi-national corporation that profited from the Iraq War, has the freedom to move its operations from Houston, Texas to Dhubai.
Happy 80th birthday, Papa.
Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com. I welcome comments even from die-hard FilAm Republicans who regularly criticize PhilNews editor Lito Gutierrez whenever he writes anything against Bush’s Iraq War. As their hero Bush said, Bring it on!
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
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