The Politics of War

This Memorial Day the nation remembers all those people who died while serving in the American armed forces.  More than 1,316,000 military personnel have died during military conflicts in this nation's history.  

The mission of the U.S. military is to fight and win our nation's wars.  The U.S. has the most powerful military in the history of the world, but it should not be utilized as a political tool, or for retribution.  The government and its leaders must do their best to make the right decisions, to be truthful with the American public, and to provide all the necessary support needed to fulfill the military's mission.  Unfortunately, this has not always been the case. 

Following the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush began to plan a response.  Vice President Dick Cheney and neo-con members of the administration, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, immediately set their sites on Saddam Hussein, Iraq's tyrannical ruler.  They were disappointed that Hussein had not been toppled during the first Gulf War in 1991.  Soon the administration made the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that Hussein was linked to the terrorist group al-Qaeda. 

But the Bush administration was cherry picking raw intelligence, much of which was unverified.  The "evidence" against Hussein was presented to Congress, which on October 11, 2002, passed the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Forces Against Iraq.  In early 2003, the British and Spanish governments proposed a U.N. resolution that gave Iraq a deadline for compliance with previous resolutions on WMDs or face military actions.  The resolution was withdrawn because France, Germany, Canada and Russia were opposed to military action; instead they called for further diplomacy.  In early March, Chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix said that progress had been made with the inspections and no WMD's had been found in Iraq.

The administration, which had rejected Blix's assessment, began making the case for war to the American people.  In February, President Bush conducted a series of interviews with news organizations, including the Spanish language channel Telemundo.  I was the head of news for Telemundo at that time, and I was present for our session.  The president told Telemundo's Pedro Sevcec that he had not made a decision to go to war.  Following the interview, I asked the president, "What about Jacques Chirac," referring to the French president.  President Bush swatted me on the shoulder with the back of his hand and said dismissively, "Oh, he'll come around."   "We're going to war," I thought.  

White House Photo

The American invasion of Iraq began on March 20.  Vice President Cheney had predicted we would be greeted as liberators.  He was wrong.  The Iraqi forces were quickly defeated but the administration mismanaged the occupation.  The Ba'athist government had collapsed, Hussein's military was disarmed, and a power vacuum ensued.  Sectarian violence broke out between the Shias and the Sunnis.  U.S. backed Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite, became Prime Minister in 2006, but his government alienated the country's Sunni minority.   

 

In 2007, President Bush implemented a troop surge in Iraq.  By adding 20,000 additional U.S. troops, primarily in capital city Baghdad, the president hoped to buy time for reconciliation among the factions.  The situation on the ground stabilized, but Sunnis still distrusted the Maliki government. 

In 2008, the Bush administration negotiated a Status of Forces Agreement with Iraq granting U.S. troops in the country legal immunities with the understanding they would be withdrawn by 2012.  When negotiations began to extend U.S. military presence, only a smaller number, Maliki and various Iraqi party leaders agreed to the extended troop deployment, but did not want to continue the legal immunities.  These immunities are a condition everywhere U.S. troops are based.   

Some critics said President Barack Obama could have done more to secure the legal immunities, but that is debatable.  In an interview on CBS News' Face the Nation Sunday, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) once again claimed an agreement could have been reached with Maliki through negotiations.  Nonetheless, President Obama withdrew American combat troops and fulfilled a campaign promise.

The Maliki government collapsed in 2014.  In the summer of 2014, ISIS, an Islamic terrorist group that had been incubating for more than a decade in Syria, launched a military offensive in Northern Iraq and declared an Islamic caliphate.  ISIS, which is Sunni, has slaughtered thousands of people in its expansion in the region.  Many Iraqi Sunnis find it preferable to the Shiite government in Baghdad.

Iraq under Hussein had served as a counter balance against Iran, its bitter enemy.  With Hussein gone Iran, a Shiite country, was working closely with the Shiites in Iraq.  Iran's influence in the region had grown, especially with the spread of ISIS.   Iraq is in turmoil and it is unlikely all of the factions, including the Kurds in the north, will come together again.

The Iraq War has been costly.  More than 4,500 members of the U.S military have been killed since the invasion.  Hundreds of thousands of casualties have been suffered by Iraqis.  Two years ago the "Costs of Wars" project, part of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, estimated that the Iraq War had already cost America more than $2 trillion.  And many veterans of Iraq, who have returned home, are unemployed, suffering from postraumatic stress disorder, or have committed suicide.  

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and many Republican presidential candidates blame President Obama for today's chaos in Iraq and the region.  Yet these candidates do not offer a plan or a solution.  In fact, former Senator Rick Santorum recently said, "If these folks (ISIS) want to return to a 7th-century version of Islam, then let's load up our bombers and bomb them back to the 7th century."   ISIS and Iraq have turned into political fodder for the Republican base.  

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, and subsequent mismanagement by the Bush administration, is the biggest mistake the U.S. has made since Vietnam.  It has led to a series of unintended and disastrous consequences.  And there is no light at the end of this tunnel for America.  

Perhaps the architects of the Iraq War should have heeded the counsel of their spiritual leader, President Ronald Reagan.  In a 1985 Veterans Day speech he said, "We endanger the peace and confuse all issues when we obscure the truth." 

Bob Simon Remembered

There have been few television correspondents who could tell a story the way Bob Simon did.   His curiosity, intelligence and sense of adventure would take him from his native Bronx, New York, to Brandeis University, and on to the front lines of history. 

CBS News hired young Bob Simon, a Fulbright Scholar, for its assignment desk in 1967.  He would soon be assigned to cover stories the more veteran reporters did not want to cover.  Four decades later he would recall, in a 2013 interview for the Archive of American Television, "Knowing what to do was simple--tell a story."

CBS News moved him to its London bureau, and from there he was assigned to cover the Vietnam War.  Working with legendary cameramen like Norman Lloyd and David Green, he excelled as a war correspondent.  "It is the biggest adrenalin rush there is," he reflected, "there is no other experience that matches it."   

Simon had an amazing ability to let the pictures carry the story while complementing the scenes with just the right words.  He remembered being there when a young Vietnamese girl was running naked down a road away from a burning village.  "What do you say?  Where it is, her name, and that there are American fighter jets."

Simon had several tours of duty in Vietnam.  He was there at the end.  He recalled that the U.S. had alerted Americans that, "When the military radio played I'm dreaming of White Christmas it would be the cue to get your asses to the embassy."  Simon said when the order came it was chaos, and climbing over the embassy wall was a problem because U.S.  Marines were driving people back.  "You had to have round eyes that day," he recalled. 

Simon became the most acclaimed network Middle East correspondent while assigned to the CBS News Tel Aviv bureau.   He would always push the borders of coverage, and he could beautifully capture its complexity.  "Rivers make the best borders," he wrote.  "Even though Jordan is little more than a lively brook at the level of the Allenby bridge, even though the two banks -- lush vegetation trailing up to mad lunarscapes -- are mirror images of each other, crossing over from Israeli territory to Jordan, always carries a sense of transition of the forbidden, of moving between enemy camps."

Simon would test those borders during the first Gulf War when he and his crew walked to the top of a sand dune near Al-Ruqi, an inland border post between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.   They were captured by the Iraqi military and held, beaten, starved and interrogated for forty days.  The Iraqis accused them of being spies.

 "'Name? Rank?' a voice shouted," Simon wrote in his riveting account of captivity in his 1992 book Forty Days.  "I'm not military, " Simon responded.  "Our sources tell us you have good relations with the government of Israel," the interrogator said.  "That's it, I thought," Simon wrote.  "The game is up.  I found this realization calming in a way...It was all over, but I would go on playing for a while." Simon and his crew would be freed after 40 days, but they were all deeply affected by the ordeal.

Simon would return to work.   He had visited 67 different countries as a foreign correspondent.  He was known among his producer colleagues for screening every inch of footage before writing his story, and then memorably capturing a scene in a few words.  For instance, Simon covered Hong Kong's transition from British rule to China in 1997.  He spotted footage of an old Chinese man doing his Tai Chi exercise in the early morning.  It would be his opening scene.  "The debts of history are coming due," he would write.

He became a full-time correspondent on 60 Minutes in 2005, but he had already filed several important pieces for the broadcast.  Before the U.S. went to war with Iraq in 2003, Simon would remember, "I knew from my sources, and from the Israelis...and whatever you think of the Israeli's, they have great intelligence, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."   He continued, "We couldn't say that...so we did a story, called 'The Selling of a War,' and the piece got a lot of attention...but (President) Bush invaded Iraq anyway."

Simon collected 27 Emmy Awards and four Peabody Awards over nearly 50 years of brilliant journalism.  It is shocking that, after covering war zones from Vietnam to the Middle East, and violent uprisings from Northern Ireland to Tiananmen Square, his life ended in the back seat of a town car on New York City's West Side Highway.  

Bob Simon is survived by his daughter, Tanya, who is a 60 Minutes producer, and wife, Franciose.  He will be greatly missed by thousands of current and former admiring colleagues and friends.  And millions of viewers will miss his distinctive voice and unique writing style.  He truly was one of a kind.    

He concluded the final chapter of Forty Days with what might have been broadcast then had things turned out differently for him.  "That obituary for Simon showed clips of him in his various disguises: safari jackets, blazers, tuxedos, covering wars, uprisings, galas.  It was well produced, well edited, and well written...It was first-rate television piece.  Clearly, it deserved to make air."

Momorial Day

This weekend the United States celebrates Memorial Day.  Sadly, for many Americans the holiday mostly marks the beginning of summer rather than a time to remember those who gave their lives in service to their country.

All across America people will flock to beaches and backyards.  They will barbeque, picnic and play baseball.  They will boat, fish, swim and bike.  Some will watch parades in small town America, sporting events on television, while others will shop at boutiques and huge malls.  Hopefully, some Americans will visit the graves of those who died for the freedoms they enjoy.   

Since the country's founding there have been more than one million U.S. war casualties.  The Civil War was this nation's bloodiest, as the death toll exceeded 623,000.  More than 116,000 Americans died in World War 1, 405,000 Americans died in World War 2, 36,516 thousand died in the Korean War, and 58,209 thousand perished in the Vietnam War. 

Over the past decade more than 2.2 million American service members have seen active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.  In that time more than 6,300 servicemen have died in those wars, and the conflict in Afghanistan continues.   But the tragedy of war extends well beyond death.  Tens of thousands of service men and women have suffered life-altering injuries, depression and other serious problems, and many struggle to reclaim a normal life. 

Very few Americans are directly impacted by today's military conflicts.  One reason is that an all-volunteer military is fighting America's wars.  The Afghanistan War, which has grown increasingly unpopular among Americans, has continued for more than a decade and the outcome remains uncertain.  News coverage of the Afghan War, especially by cable news channels and network newscasts, is sparse.  America, still struggling to regain its economic footing, is suffering from a collective war fatigue.  Yet heroic and courageous soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen fight on every day to preserve the country's freedoms.  

Memorial Day is a day for reconciliation, a day to come together.  From sea to shining sea the American flag will be raised to the top of the staff and then lowered to the half-staff position in memory of those who have died.  Then at noon the flag will be raised to full-staff to symbolize that those who are living will rise up to continue the fight for liberty and justice for all.

Let us all take a moment during our holiday weekend to pause and say thank you to the millions who have sacrificed their lives for America, and also to the brave soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen who continue to defend this country.