Author: Carol Watson

In order to maintain troop levels in Iraq, stop-loss and stop-movement orders are preventing those who would choose to leave the military from doing so, adding to the strain on families where both husband and wife are soldiers and facing separations of as long as two years.

Brian Stewmon returned late last month from an 11½-month tour in Iraq. He got home just in time to kiss his wife goodbye and send her off on her own yearlong deployment. “We expected separation, but we never expected two years,” Michelle Stewmon said last week, just after arriving in Kuwait. “People don’t know that it’s going on. They’re shocked this is happening.” The Stewmons are among a small number of dual-military families taking a double-barreled hit from the Army’s supercharged operations tempo the past two years.

Servicemembers who marry know it’s possible that one or both could be deployed. Most Army families have endured a South Korean or Balkans tour. But Operation Iraqi Freedom, with its one-year tours and large personnel demands, has boosted the burden to something no pre-9/11 soldier could have imagined.
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I suppose the oft-bleated excuse that “9/11 changed everything” will be blamed for why the man who warned against Big Brother has become Big Brother. Here’s then-Sen. John Ashcroft’s thoughts on the Internet and the Bill of Rights back in 1997.

There is a concern that the Internet could be used to commit crimes and that advanced encryption could disguise such activity. However, we do not provide the government with phone jacks outside our homes for unlimited wiretaps. Why, then, should we grant government the Orwellian capability to listen at will and in real time to our communications across the Web?

The protections of the Fourth Amendment are clear. The right to protection from unlawful searches is an indivisible American value. Two hundred years of court decisions have stood in defense of this fundamental right. The state’s interest in effective crime-fighting should never vitiate the citizens’ Bill of Rights.

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“Riverbend” is the alias of a 24-year-old Iraqi woman who started her own blog, Baghdad Burning, back in August of last year to write about her day-to-day experiences and thoughts in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. In her entry for February 15th, 2004, she speaks about the bombing of Baghdad during Gulf War I, focusing on the deaths of hundreds of mostly women and children huddled for safety in a bomb shelter in the Amiriyah district.

Amiriyah itself is an area full of school teachers, college professors, doctors and ordinary employees- a middle-class neighborhood with low houses, friendly people and a growing mercantile population. It was a mélange of Sunnis and Shi’a and Christians- all living together peacefully and happily. After the 13th of February, it became the area everyone avoided. For weeks and weeks the whole area stank of charred flesh and the air was thick and gray with ash. The beige stucco houses were suddenly all covered with black pieces of cloth scrolled with the names of dead loved ones. “Ali Jabbar mourns the loss of his wife, daughter, and two sons”; “Muna Rahim mourns the loss of her mother, sisters, brothers and sons”
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Many thanks to the Guardian(UK) for putting together this fascinating collage of opinions on the Iraqi War in their article True Colors. It’s an interesting read.

In 1937 WH Auden and Stephen Spender asked 150 writers for their views on the Spanish Civil War. The result was the book Authors Take Sides. Jean Moorcroft Wilson and Cecil Woolf have repeated the exercise, asking literary figures if they were for or against the Iraq war and whether they thought it would bring lasting peace and stability.

… read True Colors

James Longley recently traveled to Nasiriyah filming the story of a sheik in Moqtada Sadr’s religious-political movement. This is a narrative of his journey, with a side trip to Al-Garraf, a nearby town.

There is only one full-time doctor working in the medical center that services 150,000 people. There are almost no facilities and the doctor’s role is limited to prescribing medication and administering first aid in emergency cases. All long-term patients are moved to the hospital in neighboring Nasiriyah. Many essential drugs are not available at all. In fact, all the medicines in the Al Garraf medical center pharmacy came from the warehouse in Nasiriyah, and are leftover supply from before the war 9 months ago. No new medicine has been supplied to the city medical center since the U.S. forces entered Iraq, with the exception of a few drug samples given to them by the Italians.

Those I talk with in the medical center agree that conditions there are worse now under U.S. occupation than during the UN sanctions against Iraq. “At least before we had some drugs coming in through the Oil For Food Program.” says Qablan.

The largest employer in Al Garraf was a carpet factory not far from the medical center. It even made carpets for Saddam’s palaces. Now all the equipment has been removed to prevent theft and the structure stands idle. “It would only take about $10,000 to get this place running again.” says Qablan, “But now nobody is certain who has the right to buy or sell the factory, because it was previously owned and operated by the state. It can only be decided after a legitimate government has been elected. Until then we will have to wait.”

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I am not linking to this horrific article to discuss the politics of the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, fifty-nine years years ago today. I am linking to it to illustrate that war is always the most terrible method nations can resort to in settling their differences. It doesn’t matter which side you are on; death and suffering don’t play favorites. As so many have repeated this past year: war is the ultimate failure of humanity.

Toward the end of World War II, as Allied planes rained death and destruction over Germany, the old Saxon city of Dresden lay like an island of tranquillity amid desolation. Famous as a cultural center and possessing no military value, Dresden had been spared the terror that descended from the skies over the rest of the country.

Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers. Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed in the city. Together with the 600,000 refugees from Breslau, Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people…

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was in Dresden when it was bombed in 1945. Returning home to Indianapolis after the war, Vonnegut began writing short stories for magazines. Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was Slaughterhouse Five. “Yes, by your people, may I say,” he insists. “You guys burnt the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm, in that one big flame, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

The WWII Dresden Holocaust – ‘A Single Column Of Flame’