How much are you willing to pay for the war in Iraq? $100/month? $1000/month? Are you willing to join the army and go there to fight? Have you even thought about it?
President Cheney has been able to keep this charade going for years because they have wisely kept people from facing the costs. There is no draft for troops to maintain order. There is no war tax to pay for war. Of course we arent "mobilized for war", because if we were, people would pay more attention to the President's bumbling and what it will really cost us. And it will cost us. Estimates are over $1 trillion Dollars. We will pay but thanks to the mighty credit card, Bush will be long gone before the bill comes due.
This article on General Batiste is terrific. Read it. We need more men like Batiste to speak up. There is more to courage than actions on a battlefield and someone needs to have the courage to do the right thing. Someone has to hold Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld accountable for this fiasco.
The Two-Star Rebel
For Gen. Batiste, a tour in Iraq turned a loyal soldier into Rumsfeld's most unexpected critic.
May 13, 2006
Gen. Batiste stands out among the generals who have called for Mr. Rumsfeld to resign because he is the only one who served in a high position in the Pentagon and commanded troops in Iraq. He turned down a promotion and resigned last fall. He then spent the next seven months trying to decide whether to speak out in public, weighing a strong sense of duty and respect for his chain of command against a feeling that he owed it to his soldiers and their families to speak out.
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Gen. Batiste barely slept in the days leading up to the change-of-command ceremony, he says, often pacing around his house. He was haunted by something he had studied during his days at the Army War College: the regrets of Gen. Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff during the Vietnam War.
Years after he retired, Gen. Johnson told friends that at one point during the war, he planned to confront President Lyndon Johnson and quit, according to a biography by Lewis Sorley, a retired Army officer and Vietnam scholar.
"You have required me to send men into battle with little hope of the ultimate victory and you have forced us to violate almost every one of the principles of war in Vietnam," Gen. Johnson planned to tell the president, the biography says. "Therefore I resign and will hold a press conference after I walk out your door."
He never did. Before he died, Gen. Johnson lamented that he was going to his grave "with the burden of a lapse of moral courage on my back," according to the biography.
That account supports a belief -- held by many in the Army today -- that the U.S. military lost in Vietnam because it was betrayed by ill-informed politicians who disregarded their advice.
Many historians, including Army Col. H.R. McMaster, who wrote "Dereliction of Duty," a history of the top brass in Vietnam, say the truth is more complicated. Col. McMaster argues that the generals, split by rivalries and eager to curry favor with their civilian bosses, acquiesced to a policy they knew would fail in Vietnam, without raising serious objections or offering alternate strategy.
For a general to publicly disagree with civilian leaders can mean the end of a career. In one famous case, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was fired by President Truman after expressing his desire to take the Korean War further than the administration wanted.
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He says that was a reference to something he had privately discussed with fellow officers: his belief that Mr. Rumsfeld had violated a fundamental principle of war by sending in an invading force that was too small to impose security after Saddam Hussein's regime had collapsed.
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His return to the U.S. was jarring. "It shocked me that the country was not mobilized for war," he says. "It was almost surreal." For some Americans, "the only time they think about the war is when they decide what color magnet ribbon to put on the back of their car."
