5 Years Later, We Have a New Mission

Today marks the fifth anniversary of Bush's speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where he stood beneath the now infamous Mission Accomplished banner and announced, "my fellow Americans: Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."

Half a world away, my soldiers and I were preparing our rucksacks to head to Baghdad.

I remember preparing our soldiers and expecting that our Commander in Chief would be providing a plan for our "peace keeping" mission. I had been led to believe that we were going to be part of a "Phase IV," which meant that we would be "engaged in securing and reconstructing" Iraq; the very words used by our president when he addressed the sailors in front of the Mission Accomplished banner. I, like so many soldiers and civilians, believed he was telling us the truth.

As Thomas Ricks, in his book Fiasco, and many others have now proved, he was not.

There was no plan for securing. There was no plan for reconstructing.

Lieutenant Colonel Alan King recalls, in What Was Asked of Us, that as he rolled into the Baghdad Airport "they told me I had twenty-four hours to come up with a reconstruction plan for Baghdad." You read that correctly. A Lieutenant Colonel on his way to Iraq, was given 24 hours to "come up" with a plan.

Unfortunately, the mission was far from accomplished. The mission was never defined. How can an army accomplish a mission when no one decides what the mission really is? This is failure of leadership on the largest scale imaginable.

We mark the fifth anniversary of that publicity stunt, with the following;

• April marks the highest death total for US Troops in 2008.
• Over 4061 American fatalities
• Hundreds of thousand Iraq casualties
• Over 300,000 troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with MAJOR PTSD
• Estimates put the war cost at over $3 TRILLION.
• NY-26th, the district where I am running for Congress, continues to pay over $1.9 Billion alone.
• As a direct result of the war, oil and gas prices have skyrocketed, pinching families and pushing our economy toward recession.

These numbers are where we stand now. You know they will continue to grow.

Our brave men and women in uniform have done everything we have asked of them over the last five years. They struggled to do their jobs in a war with no strategy for success. They continue to serve with inappropriate equipment, insufficient training for the situation, and a lack of leadership coming from Washington. They have even returned for 3 or 4 tours of duty, only to suffer through more of the same.

Unfortunately, Washington continues to fail our troops by insisting there is a military solution to this all too political problem. They are failing to address the real issues; pressing religious, economic, and social solutions that could help stabilize the region and return a sense of pride and productivity to the lives of every day Iraqis.

In short, the mission needs to finally be defined.

Our new mission is to bring our troops home safely, securely, and soon.

This election is about embracing our new mission. It's about ending our military engagement, and about beginning a political engagement.

To achieve our new mission, America must return "leadership by example" to the world. And that means implementing strategies to address the following:

• The tragedy of hundreds of thousands of veterans coming home to a broken Veterans Administration
• Engage the millions of moderate middle-class Iraqi refugees who have lost their homes and are at risk to becoming recruited by radical elements
• Reform our approach to national security so that our military is not the only tool we use to solve political problems
• Bring accountability to the war profiteers and criminals who have fleeced our taxpayers and stolen from our troops
• Begin a diplomatic surge to engage the entire region of interested parties to help solve centuries old ethnic resentments and struggle

And that's just the beginning.

I am running for Congress so that we can finally address and accomplish our new mission, to bring leadership by example back to this world...not the phantom leadership that was so cavalierly alluded to from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln five years ago.

I need your help so we can get to Washington to bring the real leadership and real change necessary to get our country back on track.

Your new mission; sign up to support candidates across this country who will work to bring our troops home safely, securely, and soon. Together, we have the power to change Washington.

Comments

[ForeignAffairs]

Four items of good news:

1. U.S. troops have achieved victory by completing the primary objectives as defined at the beginning of the Iraq war. President Bush has said the troops should, "return on success." It"s time to do exactly that.

2. Representative Lynne Woolsey (D-CA) has drafted an Iraq troop withdrawal bill called HR5507. It would withdraw all U.S. troops within one year, send in peacekeepers for two years, and cancel the outdated Iraq Authorization for Use of Military Force. HR5507 would direct the Bush Administration to treat Iraq as a sovereign nation, instead of a U.S. colony that we presume to micromanage.

3. Next week, the House will vote on an Iraq War appropriations bill. That debate will likely be the last round of Iraq war funding debates this year, so we have a "use it or lose it" opportunity to end the war now. HR5507 should be a prerequisite, or integral component, of any Iraq war funding bill.

Our presidential candidates claim superior leadership skills and, furthermore, they are already senators.

4. We have an opportunity to challenge our presidential candidates use their much vaunted skills to endorse, publicize, and help pass HR5507 to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq, ASAP -- instead of dumping another 900 troops and $140 billion into the grinder for every year that we procrastinate.

What could be more Presidential than taking the lead to end the war that President Bush is unable to end?

[mbaty]

It's over. We failed. It's time to either get out completely or completely change our strategy, because it's clear that violence won't bring peace, and that destabilizing a region doesn't bring order, and that guns and bombs won't change someone's mind when they've decided to hold hate in their heart. And we would all turn into vigilantes if there was an occupying force in our nation. This war has benefitted those who would benefit from more terrorists and more wars to fight. A good plan to you and I might be: bring the survival basics to all the Iraqi people; give them opportunity and stability, but to Those Who Profit Greatly From War, a good plan is to continue with more of the same.

[rwe2late]

At the end of the cold war, the US became the sole superpower. The Soviet Union had collapsed, at least partly due to unsustainable military expenditures. The US also suffered economically because of its diversion of resources to the military, tellingly shown by a comparison with economic advances in Germany and Japan.
US leaders had become accustomed to power and wealth, and wanted to preserve it, in what they would call the New American Century. They had a choice, opt for the "peace dividend", and begin spending it to improve the social and physical infrastructure of the US and world. Or take the option to militarily "secure" their favored position.
The "peace dividend" option seemed unlikely to maintain their privileges.
Besides, the "military-industrial complex, and a jingoist and military mindset had become too embedded. Thus, to the detriment of us all, they chose the military option. They chose to continue and expand the military extravagance, military occupations and bases, and military alliances with "reliable" allies, however unsavory.
The trillions wasted in unnecessary wars and weapons has starved our economic infrastructure, buried us in debt, and compromised our liberties in the name of "military security".
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8813

Many oppose the Iraq war because we are "winning". Until such popular jingoist beliefs are rejected, our leaders appear to have no limit to the blood they will spill, and destruction they will cause, in order to hold on to their abused power and ill-gotten riches.

[rwe2late]

sorry typo
should read
Many oppose the Iraq war because we are NOT "winning".

[soonerdru]

Excellent post, we should all take a good, long look at who in our voting districts has continually supported the war. In my area Sens. Jim Inhofe and Mary Fallin come to mind.