Author: Carol Watson

While all Iraqis are suffering as a result of this totally unnecessary war, Iraqis of Palestinian descent are perhaps worse off than most of their countrymen. Jo Wilding gives a brief first-hand account of what their lives are like now:

She lives in a tent with UNHCR stamped on the roof in the grounds of the old Haifa Palestinian Sports Club, among twelve thousand homeless families. “I was born in Iraq and brought up here, married here and had my children here, but my father was Palestinian so I am Palestinian. I have no nationality, no identification, no right to own property.”

After the war the landlord came to the house and threatened to douse it in petrol and burn it if they didn’t leave. Her four sons live there with her but her two daughters have been squeezed into a relative’s house. “There are so many young men here. I am too afraid for them here. But they had to stop going to school because of the situation. It is not safe.”

For a time they were supported by the UN and aid agencies, she said, but there has been no constant assistance for some months now. Half of the aid is taken anyway by the people inside. She and her friend gestured towards the buildings and offices of the club. “They sell it outside the camp. But Dr Qusay owns the club and if he did not let us live here we would be on the streets.”
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Victoria Schofield, a specialist on South Asia, is the author of “Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia.” In this commentary for the Daily Star (Lebanon), she discusses the tense and dangerous border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan and how it has been affected by the continued fighting there.

That the Pakistani Army’s raid last week into South Waziristan met with local resistance should not have come as a surprise. Ever since Pakistan became an independent country, the mountainous region bordering Afghanistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas has been a law unto itself. Occupied by numerous different tribes, or khels, the inhabitants of this region have never officially been incorporated into the constitutional framework of Pakistan. And although Pakistan controls the main roads to the Afghan frontier, most famously the Khyber Pass which leads to Torkham on the border and onward to Jalalabad and Kabul, the areas lying in between are neither governed by Pakistan, nor do they come under its legal jurisdiction.

This anomalous relationship arises from the days of the British occupation of the northwest frontier in the early 20th century. Whereas British troops were able to establish control over “settled areas” in the plains, they found that the cost was too high to exert their authority over the mountainous tribal regions…

The Pakistani government may well be justified in launching offensives into tribal territory in pursuit of terrorists. But its actions also have the potential of alienating those who, though not involved in terrorist acts, are developing a new resentment against the federal authorities. After the raid, Afridi stated that the government had “sold the freedom of tribal people” to the American Federal Bureau of Investigation, and he pointed out that the government was forcing tribesmen to rebel.

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William Rivers Pitt presents this powerful perpective on who will be the soldier whose death will receive the dubious honor of being The Five Hundred in our continuing tragic war in Iraq.

It will be upon us soon. Sometime, likely before January is out, the 500th American soldier to die in Iraq will fall. He will be killed by a roadside bomb, or a mortar, or a rifle shot from afar, or a pistol to the back of the head in a crowd, or a rocket-propelled grenade into his convoy, or into his helicopter which will plunge, blazing, from the sky. He will fall in Baghdad, or Tikrit, or Mosul, or some unnamed town in between…

Must that 500th soldier be a man? Ask Rachel Bosveld, who was 19, Kimberly Hampton, who was 27, Sharon Swartworth, who was 43, Karina Lau, who was 20, Analaura Gutierrez, who was 21, Alyssa Peterson, who was 27, Melissa Valles, who was 26 or Lori Ann Piestewa, who was 23, what place gender has on the fields of the dead. They would answer, if they could, but their voices were lost in the grinding of the guns in Iraq…

The number of wounded American soldiers shipped home fails to find a consistent count. Some say 2,000, others say 9,000, and still others say 11,000 and rising. Another generation of shredded American veterans has been born, honored when the country needs heroes to inspire the next generation into enlisting, but forgotten the rest of the time, left to pinch pennies and rub the stumps where their healthy young legs used to send them running and leaping and dancing through a life they surrendered in a blinding flash of pain and light…

His synopsis of the bald-faced lies that brought us into this war is followed by this dire prediction of the outcome:

American forces will never leave Iraq. It was never about freedom, or democracy. It was about the occupation of an oil-rich nation in a world where petroleum stores are dwindling. Perhaps it was about revenge for September 11, but if so, it was revenge taken on a virtually defenseless civilian population that had no hand in these attacks. It was also about profit. Nearly $200 billion has been spent to date on this invasion and occupation. Most of that money has gone to massive corporations like Dick Cheney’s Halliburton, to George Herbert Walker Bush’s Carlyle Group, to weapons manufacturers, to other petroleum companies. Once upon a time, that money belonged to you. Now, it belongs to them.

So it goes for that 500th soldier, who may be the 550th soldier for all we know. Not so long ago he, or she, raised a hand and swore an oath to defend the United States of America, and pledged his, or her, life to that cause. Implicit in that oath was a promise from the country honored to receive that oath. That promise? Your life will not be spent to no good end, soldier. Your life will not be wasted. The promise was broken…

While the War Party cheerfully celebrates the holiday season attending galas and fundraisers, the forgotten wounded deal with the prospects of a New Year very different from the last they celebrated.

A Soldier’s Return
Since the war started, more than 2,300 American soldiers in Iraq have been hurt in combat, many by artillery shells and homemade bombs that spray shrapnel. Bulletproof vests and helmets protect vital organs. But as the insurgency continues, doctors say that severe facial injuries, along with wounds to the arms and legs, are becoming a hallmark of this war.

Sgt. Jeremy Feldbusch, a fit, driven, highly capable Army Ranger, left home in February knowing the risks of combat. Two months later, he came home blind.

A growing number of young men and women are returning from Iraq and trying to resume lives that were interrupted by war and then minced by injury. Sergeant Feldbusch, a moody 24-year-old, is one of them, back in a little town in western Pennsylvania, in a little house overlooking trees and snow-blanketed hills he cannot see.

During the two months Jeremy Feldbusch spent recovering at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, his parents lived at his bedside. Charlene Feldbusch remembers one day seeing a young female soldier crawling past her in the corridor with no legs and her 3-year-old son trailing behind…

Kudos to The Army Times:
Their Photos Tell the Story, by Jimmy Breslin
The Army Times, a civilian newspaper that is sold mainly on military bases and thus reaches the prime wartime audience, uses eight pages of its year-end review, out now, to run photos of all those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan…

In introducing the pictures, under the headline “Faces of the Fallen,” the Army Times said: “More than 500 service members died in operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom in 2003, a group that represents the full, rich face of American diversity.

“They grew up in big cities like Chicago and New York and small towns like Layton, Utah, and Cross Lanes, West Virginia. Ten were women, the youngest six 18-year-olds barely out of high school. The oldest, Army Sgt. Floyd G. Nightman Jr., was 55.

The chilling photos run at a time when the government tries to describe the war as a civic venture, and nearly all of the news industry doesn’t know how to object. This probably is the worst failure to inform the public that we have seen…

And the dead are brought back here almost furtively. There are no ceremonies or pictures of caskets at Dover, Del., air base, where the dead are brought. “You don’t want to upset the families,” George Bush said. That the people might be slightly disturbed already by the death doesn’t seem to register. The wounded are flown into Washington at night. There are 5,000 of them and for a long time you never heard of soldiers who have no arms and legs…

…who doesn’t march to the beat of the Pentagon’s drummer. It is alarming enough that much of the media have voluntarily fallen into lockstep with the Administration, but not content with that, they now want to silence the remainder who refuse to compromise their ethics to churn out propaganda.

“When George Bush’s Pentagon doesn’t like what a reporter writes, it attempts a preemptive strike. In the case of Tom Ricks, military reporter for the Washington Post, the Pentagon took the attack right to the heart of the enemy. Defense Department spokesman Larry DiRita first sent a letter of complaint to the Post; then he met with the paper’s top editors to press his points.

“Ricks is one of the most senior defense reporters in the country. He covered military affairs for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years and has been doing the same for the Post since 1999. He’s written two books about the military, one about the Marines and a novel about the US intervention in Afghanistan, published four months before the United States sent in troops.

“In his more than two decades covering the military, Ricks has developed many sources, from brass to grunts. This, according to the current Pentagon, is a problem…”
see: Pentagon to Washington Post Reporter Ricks