The Fromson File

The Cost of War The debate over the U.S. role in Iraq is just beginning to heat up in the mainstream media. See the cover story in the November 3d edition of Newsweek, a special investigation entitled “Bush’s $87 Billion Mess,” subtitled “Waste, Chaos and Cronyism: the Real Cost of Rebuilding Iraq.” Thirty five years ago, a troubled Republican Senator from Vermont named George Aiken offered a proposal to extract the United States from the morass in Vietnam. Declare victory, have a parade and bring the troops home, he said. It never happened then and it is not likely to happen now with respect to Iraq. Now, more than six months since the President, his circle of confidantes and the CIA told the world that Sadaam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and the U.S. knew where they were, we have come up empty-handed. No weapons and no proof they exist now if in fact they ever did. They were the basis for legitimizing the invasion of Iraq in the first place. Regime change was not the primary motivation even though it succeeded. However, rumors persist that the Iraqi dictator may have survived. At least there is no corpus delecti to prove otherwise. Moreover, the sophistication of the urban warfare being against American troops and even Iraqi civilians in and around Baghdad suggests another possibility. It is that these attacks are far from being carried out by criminals, rogue elements of the old Iraqi army or foreign terrorists aligned with Osama bin Laden, as the White House claims. Brigadier General Martin E. Dempsey, the commander of the First Armored Division, said on Sunday he had not seen “any infusion of foreign fighters” in Baghdad. Perhaps then the attacks on U.S. forces actually may be the work of surviving elements of the elite Republican Guard that the Pentagon assured us was all but destroyed during the war. Despite the victorious claims made by the Administration, there has been no evidence of abandoned or burned out tanks, other armor, bodies, the aftermath of battle, to prove the annihilation of the Guard. Spinning History The arguments voiced by the Administration and its allies in Congress would indicate they have no end game for Iraq. In a speech to the Philippines Congress on October 18 that must have startled many knowledgeable Filipinos, President Bush expressed his hopes for the future of Iraq with an analogy to the U.S. administration of the Philippines that led to the formation of a democracy. What he did not say was that the American flag flew over the islands for nearly 50 years. When it finally was lowered, I remember reporting on a number of inept or corrupt governments that emerged after independence was declared until the time Ferdinand Marcos was finally ousted. Was the President envisioning an American presence in Iraq that came even close to five decades? In the Senate debate over the $87 billion package for Iraq, just what did one Republican senator mean when he said it was the U.S. intention “to restore freedom and democracy” and another senator said the goal was to ensure “a stable, free and democratic government” in Iraq. What high school history class did they flunk? Not in modern times, when the British failed to unite the country in the 1920s or much further back in history when it was part of the ancient nation of Mesopotamia several centuries ago has Iraq known what we in the West think of as freedom. To suggest, as the President did in Manila, that an American goal was to have Iraq become a laboratory for spreading democratic traditions in the Middle East, was a staggering admission of just how little he understood the nature of the region. Faced with mounting obstacles to an easy or quick exit from Iraq, I was reminded of what we heard frequently in Saigon when I was reporting from there during the gloomiest days of the Vietnam War. “We can’t just cut and run,” U.S. officials told us, echoing the politicians and generals in Washington. It was as if admitting that a gross miscalculation of what the U.S. might accomplish in Vietnam was somehow cowardly. It meant that twice as many American GIs who had been killed or wounded up until the Tet Offensive of January 1968 would never make it home in one piece by the time we finally pulled the plug in 1973 and abandoned the South Vietnamese government altogether two years later. Nation Building This is not to suggest that American casualties in Iraq will ever approach the numbers in Vietnam. Or is it to ignore the fact that some signs of stability are beginning to emerge, especially outside of Baghdad. But nation-building is a dubious undertaking at best. I am reminded of the time I went trekking in the mountains of Afghanistan decades ago and got caught in a firefight between rival warlords. When I returned to Kabul and went to see officials at the American Embassy, what I heard was talk about the promise of nation-building. I then wrote a dispatch for the Associated Press, comparing the futility of that goal with writing a constitution for Mars. Certainly, there are significant numbers of sophisticated, well-educated Iraqis who want nothing less than modernity and freedom for their country. But they were muzzled by Sadaam Hussein and the Muslim fundamentalists aspiring to fill the vacuum created by his disappearance, hardly seem tolerant of progressive ideas imported from the West. A Loss to Remember Meanwhile, American GIs are being killed almost on a daily basis by bombings, sniper fire or rocket attacks. But in its October 13-20 edition, the New Republic shed light on another but under reported aspect of the casualties. In addition to the nearly 200 American KIAs reported, another 1300 have been wounded in combat, many with serious injuries. “The sheer number of wounded soldiers exceeds anything Americans have seen since Vietnam,” wrote Senior Editor Lawrence F. Kaplan. Take the case of Specialist Brandon Erickson, a 22-year-old from Grand Forks, North Dakota, who may never have imagined he would be in a war when he signed up with the National Guard. He was trained to build bridges, not seek out suspicious vehicles along the riverbanks leading to Baghdad. As Kaplan reports it, Erickson was traveling in a truck convoy north of the Iraqi capital when unidentified insurgents set off a rigged artillery shell in front of his vehicle. Within seconds, three rocket-propelled grenades struck the truck and one of them exploded on the passenger side of the cab in which Erickson was riding. His elbow was leaning outside of the window when the attack occurred. “I was bleeding so bad,” Erickson told Kaplan, “they used a wrench to tighten the tourniquet….my arm was hanging on by muscle tissue…When I came out of anesthesia, I looked down and it was gone.” The young soldier was evacuated to Germany and finally Walter Reed Hospital in Washington where he underwent three more operations in the next nine weeks and was fitted with a prosthesis. As I thought about Erickson’s plight, I recalled the weekends I volunteered my time as a GI, waiting to be transferred from occupied Japan to the war in Korea more than 50 years ago. I was at the Tokyo Army Hospital, reading letters from home to a ward of soldiers blinded in combat. I could only imagine how their lives turned out. Specialist Erickson is destined to be discharged before long and returned home soon with medals on his chest. But for the rest of his life, be it 10, 30 or 50 years from now, he will awaken every morning and fondle the stump where his right arm used to be. No doubt, he will be told he lost his arm for his country. He may have a different perspective. Perhaps those who sent him to Iraq can shuck the platitudes and have a better explanation for the young man from Middle America.