Obama Could Issue an Executive Order to End the Wars Tomorrow (Yes, It's That Simple)

By Nora Eisenberg, AlterNet. Posted January 29, 2009.

A commission should look at underlying issues such as the lack of healthy food, clean water, robust education, jobs and health care, as well as the lack of political, economic and social equality, to name a few. Our reliance on foreign energy supplies and our excessive consumption should also be evaluated.

NE: You are an avid fighter for veterans, and you are also a critic of many wars and rampant militarism. How do the two relate to one another? Why do you think the view that the two are contradictory -- that you're not supporting the troops if you want to stop a war -- has held such sway?

PS: Calling for an end to the Iraq war fiasco and asking that our troops be brought home is supporting our troops. In contrast, starting a war based on lies or without a plan to win harms our troops and our nation's reputation.

We hope President Obama ends the war with a responsible plan that takes care of our troops and restores stability to Iraq -- a nation that suffered 2 million internally displaced, 2 million international refugees, and up to 1 million killed due to Bush's war. We look forward to learning more about how he plans to use his strong election mandate to end the war and rebuild our economy devastated by excessive corporate greed, tax cuts for the rich and a terrible war.

Our nation is strong when we are free, informed and actively engaged in the political process. When we speak at public events, VCS frequently hands out copies of our Constitution with a sharp request to read it, understand it and live it. We are born free, and our Constitution helps people understand our rights so tyrants may not usurp our freedoms.

When anyone uses fear in an attempt to restrict our freedom, such as the Patriot Act, uses lies or propaganda, such as those to start the Iraq war, or tries to restrict our access to our political process, such as the recent bogus voter-ID laws in several states, then we must remain vigilant and stop these tactics. …

Our service members agree to do one thing when we join the military: protect and defend our Constitution. The more people who read, understand and live our Constitution, then the greater protection we have against tyranny and the misuse of our government and military.

Since the notorious Gulf of Tonkin Resolution … our nation has been misled into two more major wars: the Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq war in 2003. Americans often forget that former President George H. W. Bush and his defense secretary, Dick Cheney, misled America about the Gulf War.

Top public relations firms were paid millions of dollars to fabricate Iraqi atrocities to inflame passions and start the march toward war. Even Gen. Colin Powell misled America in 1991, stating Iraq was prepared to attack Saudi Arabia when, in fact, there were no Iraqi troops near the Saudi border, according to satellite photographs published before Desert Storm began.

NE: The Bush White House in its last weeks issued reports that cast George Bush as the friend of veterans. I gather you think the record shows otherwise. Can you give us some examples of especially craftily distorted data?

PS: Veterans for Common Sense will be issuing a detailed report, full of official VA and military statistics, describing the status of VA when the Bush administration departed. In an effort to move forward from the past eight years, VCS hopes our report serves as a yardstick to measure the progress of the Obama administration in addressing the needs of our veterans and their families.

The biggest propaganda statement not addressed in our upcoming report is where Bush repeatedly stated that he supported our service members and veterans. The facts show Bush did not support our troops or our veterans. His actions sank far below incompetence and tumbled downward past malicious.

In addition to the carnage and the destruction he ordered against Iraq, President Bush is personally responsible for nearly 5,000 service member deaths, more than 76,000 nonfatal battlefield casualties and more than 400,000 unexpected veteran patients from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars treated at VA hospitals and clinics.

As commander in chief of our military, Bush failed to listen to national security advisors between January 2001 and Sept. 11, 2001, and bears some responsibility for not heeding the warnings about the impending attacks, according to the book The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission by former New York Times reporter Phil Shenon. His book documents that Bush was briefed more than 40 times about Osama bin Laden before 9/11. … Many of Bush's catastrophic failures were compounded by conservative ideological rigidity and his inability to listen to facts.

By ordering torture, by ending habeas corpus and by spying on innocent American citizens, Bush trashed our beloved Constitution -- the very document our soldiers fight to defend. Bush then lied to start his war and sent 1.8 million Americans to fight a pre-emptive, unilateral war against Iraq that did not need to be fought.

Bush was president when the Walter Reed Army Medical Center scandal shocked us all -- a brutal betrayal that came nearly two years after his botched response to Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans. Bush then fought against VA benefits for our returning combat veterans. The same soldiers given Purple Heart medals by Bush at Walter Reed would languish many years without VA disability benefits for post-traumatic stress disorder and then be turned away from VA hospitals when they became suicidal.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, vietnam, 9/11, torture, afghanistan, robert gates, barack obama, blackwater, mercenaries, george w. bush, military contractors, ptsd, walter reed, department of defense, depleted uranium, gulf war, jeremy scahill, veterans affairs, gulf war syndrome, paul sullivan, veterans for common sense, bonus army, post-traumatic stress dis, penatgon, phil sheldon

Nora Eisenberg is the author of the novels The War at Home, a Washington Post Rave of the Year 2002, and Just the Way You Want Me, awarded the 2004 Gold Prize for Fiction from ForeWord Magazine, the weekly of independent publishing. Her new novel, issued this month by Curbstone Press, is about troops returning home from the 1991 Gulf War, and the unexpected price of war for young victors and their families.

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