Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [121]
A wartime moment I particularly relished was hearing Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska suggest on April 1 that New York’s cops and firefighters should work overtime without pay as a wartime sacrifice. “I really feel strongly that we ought to find some way to convince the people that there ought to be some volunteerism at home,” quoth this worthy. “Those people overseas in the desert, they’re not getting paid overtime. . . . I don’t know why the people working for the cities and counties ought to be paid overtime when they’re responding to matters of national security.” He had just voted for a tax plan that would give $92,000 in tax cuts to our friend B Rapoport, who is worth a couple hundred million. Some must sacrifice more than others.
While the war itself went as well as could be expected, we are still faced with the peace from hell. A million Iraqi Shiites made pilgrimmage to Karbal¯a’ a week after the war, screaming, “No to Saddam and no to America!” Our troops are a magnet for every terrorist in the Middle East and continue to get picked off in apparently random incidents.
As we advanced on Baghdad, the unwelcome news arrived that many on the Christian right were aflame with enthusiasm for going to Iraq and converting the hapless heathen to Christianity.
This is guaranteed to make us as popular as the clap.
In terms of the “real people” affected by all this, the United States sent 250,000 American soldiers to fight this war. They were the Americans most seriously affected, yanked away from their homes and families. There was a clear class division between those who were related to someone serving in Iraq, or who even knew someone there, and those who didn’t. It was hard to find anyone at a country club or on an elite college campus or in a boardroom with a connection, but at the Las Vegas convention of the Service Employees International Union in mid-March, parent after parent stood to express the rending conflict they felt over the war. This was the first war fought by the United States without support from the AFL-CIO.
Meanwhile, no weapons of mass destruction, Bush’s most often cited reason for the invasion, have been found. This presents a monumental credibility problem for the Bush administration. As the weeks passed with no sign of WMDs, a perfect festival of backpedaling and spin ensued. If Iraq had no WMDs, this was not a spinnable situation. Either the government had lied to us and to the rest of the world to get us into an unnecessary war, or its own intelligence was insanely inaccurate.
One of the postwar issues you will want to keep an eye on is the health effects of using depleted uranium weapons. Depleted uranium (DU) is the low-level radioactive waste left over from manufacturing nuclear fuel and bombs. It is used in weapons and missiles by the United States, Britain, Russia, and several other nations—though not by Iraq. According to the San Francisco Chronicle—and numerous other sources—“Military experts regard DU as an almost magically effective material. DU is 1.7 times denser than lead, and when a weapon made with a DU tip or core strikes the side of a tank or bunker, it slices straight through and erupts in a burning radioactive cloud. In addition, armor made of DU appears to make tanks far less vulnerable on the battlefield.” It plays offense, it plays defense: who could ask for anything more? During Gulf War I, U.S. planes and tanks unloaded 320 tons of munitions made with DU on the people of Iraq. In exactly the areas most heavily hit, health problems have been especially severe. Nationwide in Iraq, the number of cancer cases in children has risen fivefold, and congenital birth defects and leukemia have tripled, according to Iraqi health officials. Many health authorities here have concluded that DU is the origin of Gulf War syndrome, the puzzling concatenation of maladies that have hit Gulf I vets. The Pentagon denies any