Another lie leads U.S. into war

On June 24, at our weekly meeting, the Greater Bangor Area Chapter of Veterans for Peace voted to support the national Veterans for Peace in its call for the impeachment of President Bush, Vice President Cheny, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Attorney General Ashcroft. The basis for this is that the Iraq war is in violation of international law.

I totally agree with this position, and while international law is a wonderful thing (it may be the first real attempt we humans have made to live together peacefully in our gory history), there is another charge to be made against these men, and that charge should be heard. It strikes much closer to home than an appeal to international law.

The American people were convinced to support this conflict on the grounds that Iraq posed an immediate threat to us because of its possession of “weapons of mass destruction.” If this was true than why have these weapons not been found? If this was not true then someone has lied to the American people and as a result, men, women and children have died. Young American men and women have both died and killed for a lie. If any act can be described as a high crime or misdemeanor, a lie of that nature must qualify. If this country has gone to war on the basis of that lie then it is clearly a situation that demands the most severe penalty.

What makes this situation even more terrible is that it will be the second time in my lifetime that this has happened. The last was in the summer of 1964, almost 40 years ago. In August of that year two American destroyers were in the Gulf of Tonkin supporting commando raids on the coast of North Vietnam. There was a torpedo boat attack on the USS Maddox on Aug. 2, when commando operations against North Vietnam were taking place. After denying any involvement with the raids, a claim was made that there was a second attack on Aug. 4. This claim has since been proven false. It was exposed in the statements of Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, [former Pentagon official] Daniel Ellsberg, Undersecretary of State George Ball, and many others.

By their admissions we went into the most divisive war in American history on the basis of a lie. At this time in history we might remember that fact. There is a long, black wall in Washington covered with the names of the best and most committed members of a generation who are dead because the people who directed American policy in 1964 lied to the American public and manipulated this country into war. We don’t need another long, black wall.

On the wall that we now have there are names of men and women who never had a chance to live out their lives. On that wall the names include the man who might have brought peace to the Middle East and the woman who might have discovered a cure for cancer. They include others who because of their commitment to their country would have made life better for so many of us today but they didn’t because a handful of liars in high places sent them into a Southeast Asian hell and they returned in black plastic body bags.

This history appears to have been forgotten in the CNN, Fox News, Rupert Murdoch presentation where war is shown as either a video game or some kind of sports event where scores are counted in human dead. Somehow the reason for the war has been made insignificant. The position has become one where truth no longer matters. We won the war so the fact that the publicly stated reason for starting it was false doesn’t matter. The end justifies the means, even though we still don’t know what the end will be.

Saddam was, or is, a really evil person so the Iraqis will be eternally grateful for the American and British bombs that drove him from office. This is false. The end never justifies the means as we have seen over and over in the history of the 20th century.

While it is true that Saddam may be one of the most despicable human beings in the last few hundreds years, we went to war on the basis of a lie. There are many despicable heads of state in the world and some of them receive monthly checks from Washington. Mass murder has never been a disqualifying item on the checklist used by our government when deciding which governments to support and which to condemn.

The American people were not given the opportunity to ask if this issue was so terrible that we will ask our young people to kill or die for it. We were manipulated, then, after the manipulation was exposed, treated as if truth was meaningless. This is frightening. In a political system that is structured so as to expect citizens to determine the political direction that their government will choose, lies supported by the power of mass media are a form or coup d’etat as dangerous as a palace takeover or a manipulated election. We must not allow that to happen.

Ron Gillis is a Bangor resident and president of the Greater Bangor Area Chapter of Veterans for Peace.