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“Body of War” (www.bodyofwar.com) is a documentary produced by Phil Donahue. Yes, he’s a liberal; but no one of any ideological stripe who sees even snippets of this film will be able to ignore it, for it makes clear the human cost of the Iraq war. It’s the story of a soldier who went to Iraq gung-ho and came back needing his mom to catheterize him so he can urinate. He’s 25, and he wants the world to see the way the war left him.
He won’t walk again. He won’t make love. He won’t do the ordinary things we assume our children will one day do. That soldier, Tomas Young, is an embodiment of the plague this war has visited on Americans and Iraqis alike. Watch as much of Young’s story as your heart will bear — and ask yourself whether this war is worth that kind of loss.
Yes, even “good” wars exact horrific costs, but this is not a good war. Iraq never posed a threat like Japan or Germany did in World War II. And in WWII, Japan and Germany were the invaders; in this war we are the invaders. We went in not knowing what we were getting into or how we would get out.
That’s clear in “Bush’s War,” done by the award-winning “Frontline” TV series. “Bush’s War” is built on interviews with journalists, military officers and career foreign-service officers. It makes clear that, as retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffery told Congress recently, Rumsfeld’s Iraq policy “led (the U.S.) over a cliff.” In “Bush’s War,” Gen. Jack Keane (retired) says, “We had no military strategy to defeat the insurgency.”
Rumsfeld was so deluded that he believed the Iraqis would welcome us and the rest of the world would pour soldiers in, so ours could get out.
“Bush’s War” shows the Bush Administration fighting its own civil war, fractured by turf battles that stifled dissent. Just as there was no international coalition to fight the Iraq war, there was no cohesive coalition within the Bush White House.
In an irony absurd coming from a president who claims that decisions will be made not by “politicians in Washington” but by “generals on the ground,” “Bush’s War” shows that the war was so ineptly waged that it drove commanders out of the service rather than stay on as party to policy that risked soldiers’ lives but had no chance of success.
Gen. Tommy Franks stepped down because he would no longer tolerate the administration’s war “plan.” Franks’ replacement, Gen. Richard Sanchez, had never commanded more than 17,000 troops but was suddenly thrust into command of 150,000. Even Rumsfeld, Frontline reports, knew that Sanchez “didn’t know what was going on.”
Gudmundson claims the so-called surge is working. Distinguished military men disagree.
Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (retired), head of Army intelligence and National Security Agency director under Ronald Reagan, recently told Congress that talk of political reconciliation in Iraq “has nothing to do with the real world.”
He said it would’ve been easier to get Abraham Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis to compromise about the Civil War than to get rival Iraqi factions to compromise.
The recent debacle in Basra bears that out: Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki “orders” militiamen to stop fighting but sheepishly extends his “deadline” when it becomes clear he can’t enforce it. Claims about the surge’s “success” conveniently forget that putting more American soldiers at risk was supposed to be temporary cover so Iraqis could build political solutions. That has not happened.
“Body of War” shows Sen. Richard Byrd, palsied by age but arguing forcefully before we went to war that we should not go to war, that this was the people’s country and that we the people should not allow our leaders take us down a deadly path that flies in the face of every American ideal. That white-haired old man was right.
The course we should stay is the tradition of American resistance, of unwillingness to kneel before a king. If we collectively had that courage, if we lived up to the convictions we claim to hold dear, young Tomas Young would be toileting himself and looking to a future of hope rather than despair.
Schild lives in Winona.
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