George Bush Might Call Me a Defeatist

by James Glaser
by James Glaser

But I’m telling you we are not even close to winning Bush’s war in Iraq. We have been in Iraq almost three years, and American troops are still in a lock down. No American trooper can take a stroll down the streets of Baghdad or any other Iraqi city.

George Bush is so afraid of the truth coming out about his war in Iraq, and the position we are in over there, that he has resorted to name-calling of anyone who speaks his mind.

President Bush stated in a speech to the nation on December 18, 2005:

Yet there is a difference between honest critics who recognize what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see anything right… Defeatism may have its partisan uses, but it is not justified by the facts. For every scene of destruction in Iraq, there are more scenes of rebuilding and hope. For every life lost, there are countless more lives reclaimed. And for every terrorist working to stop freedom in Iraq, there are many more Iraqis and Americans working to defeat them. My fellow citizens: Not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq.

Sounds Good. One has to admit that George Bush is pretty slick with his speeches (either that or his speech writers are), but every time he talks he makes it an "us against them" position.

Right off the bat George says the people who disagree with him and his war are "partisans." Merriam Webster defines a partisan as "one who exhibits blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance." George is hinting that those "partisans" who disagree with him are just Democrats who are trying to tear him down and the country with him. What George Bush does not realize is that many of the people who now believe that George Bush’s Iraq War was a mistake from the start and a war we can’t win, do have an allegiance, but that allegiance is not to the Democrat party or even the Republican party, but to the American Constitution, and to the American troops George has sent on this fool’s mission.

When George Bush says, "For every life lost, there are countless more lives reclaimed," he has no basis for that statement. America has told the world that "we don’t do body counts." According to the Secretary of Defense and his top generals, we have no idea of how many Iraqis we have killed and using the number "countless lives reclaimed" is so nebulous that it has no meaning at all.

George claims that there is more rebuilding going on in Iraq than scenes of destruction. Watch the evening news and look at the videos they show, and see if you can spot this massive rebuilding effort. The Iraqi people have fewer than 12 hours of electricity a day and on many days fewer than six. We, the United States of America, destroyed the civilian infrastructure of Iraq at the start of this war. That is a war crime. The fact is that Iraq produces less electricity today than before we attacked. Iraq pumps less oil and refines less gasoline than before we attacked, and they now must import fuel from other countries. Without electricity, drinking water does not get purified, and sewage treatment comes to a halt

Bush goes on to state the obvious – we have more troops than the terrorists have. What is also obvious is that most of the people fighting us are not terrorists, but Iraqi citizens trying to kick our troops out of their country.

It is a fact that our troops can not walk or even ride around Iraq on their off-duty time. Iraq is a total combat zone for American troops. Our military command and our embassy staff are locked up in a place called the Green Zone in Baghdad, where extraordinary security is provided because of the constant threat of attack by insurgents – insurgents who are thought of by many Iraqis as patriots.

I must give George Bush a bit of a break though. George Bush never went to war. George was the right age when his country put out a "call to arms" looking for patriotic Americans to defend our country, but George never heard that call. Because George Bush never went to war, he is really in the dark when it comes to understanding what is going on in Iraq. Bush has no idea of the suffering we are inflicting on the Iraqi people nor is he able to understand what he is asking of our troops. Without knowing what war and combat entail, George Bush does not possess the knowledge needed to claim that we are winning.

George Bush is trying to paint a rosy picture about Iraq, and the help we are getting from the Iraqi people. That might have been true in the euphoria of defeating Saddam Hussein, but we have been fighting there too long, and we have worn out our welcome. The British Sunday Telegraph reports about attacks on coalition troops:

The poll, undertaken for the Ministry of Defence and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, shows that up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks and fewer than one per cent think Allied military involvement is helping to improve security in their country.

Other views, moreover, are more negative: Fewer than half, 46 percent, say the country is better off now than it was before the war. And half of Iraqis now say it was wrong for U.S.-led forces to invade in spring 2003, up from 39 percent in 2004.

The number of Iraqis who say things are going well in their country overall is just 44 percent, far fewer than the 71 percent who say their own lives are going well. Fifty-two percent instead say the country is doing badly.

There's other evidence of the United States' increasing unpopularity. Two-thirds now oppose the presence of U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq, 14 points higher than in February 2004. Nearly six in 10 disapprove of how the United States has operated in Iraq since the war, and most of them disapprove strongly. And nearly half of Iraqis would like to see U.S. forces leave soon.

Two thirds of Iraqis oppose our presence in Iraq, and George Bush says we are winning this war. Of course many in George Bush’s administration told us before we attacked, that the Iraqi people would lay flower petals in our troops’ path. That didn’t happen. Instead they laid down hidden explosive devices and killed and wounded almost 20,000 of our troops.

Think about these facts: 2,180 American Soldiers and Marines are dead, 16,155 are wounded, and tens of thousands have psychological problems after their return from the combat zone. Somewhere between 35,000 and 110,000 innocent Iraqis are dead, tens of thousands more are maimed (we really don’t keep a count) and still more are displaced. Iraq was a pitiful third-world country when we attacked. They had no navy, no air force, outdated weapons, and poorly trained troops. It is now almost three years later, and no American is safe any place in Iraq, and George Bush says we are winning.

George Bush is the "partisan" here, not me. I just don’t know what faction he is giving his blind allegiance to, but I do know it is not to our troops, or our nation’s Constitution, or the truth.

January 5, 2006

Jim Glaser [send him mail], a Marine Corps Vietnam War veteran and Commander of American Legion Post 499, works to educate the American public on the consequences of war. His personal website is James-Glaser.com.

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