thedrifter
09-29-07, 07:16 AM
WHY ARE WE IN IRAQ?
By Richard Reeves
Fri Sep 28, 7:58 PM ET
BERLIN -- Here is a report from the front. The writer is an Army colonel:
"We are bitter about the whole thing. We fight desperately for all we're worth; not only because our course is right, but also because we're fighting for our survival. But is all seems so useless and stupid. To 'liberate,' we're destroying (the country) and its people. They all hate us. Everyone here is an enemy. We can't trust anyone. ... I feel more and more that we have made a supreme error in committing our forces to this bottomless pit."
Not Iraq. That is a letter from Korea, from Col. Paul Freeman (later a four-star general), commander of the 325th Regiment, 2nd Division, U.S. Army, to his wife, Mary Anne, on Sept. 12, 1950. It is on page 586 of "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War," the last and very powerful book written by the late David Halberstam, which was published this week.
In the introduction, Halberstam writes of going into the public library in Key West, Fla., and seeing that there were 88 books on the war in Vietnam but only four on the Korean War. He notes: "To the degree that the Korean War ever had a niche in popular culture, it was through the Robert Altman anti-war movie (and then sitcom) M*A*S*H, about a mobile surgical hospital operating during that war. Ostensibly about Korea, the film was really about Vietnam, and came out in 1970, at the high-water mark of popular protest against that war."
And "The Coldest Winter" is really about Iraq and Vietnam.
I was home from school -- sick, I guess -- on June 30, 1950, when a black-and-white map of the Korean peninsula appeared on our little Philco television screen. The rotten communists in North Korea had invaded the good guys of South Korea. Soon enough a voice from somewhere mentioned things like the 38th parallel and said that U.S. troops would soon be there to teach the Reds a lesson they would never forget.
"Yes!" I thought or maybe shouted. Finally! It seems I was not alone. President Harry Truman was saying, "By God, I'm going to let them have it!" The commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, the immortal Douglas MacArthur, came to see it as a chance to destroy Red China. So did I, of course, but I was a 12-year-old boy who thought America was invincible.
"How could that be?" I thought as I read the book here thousands of miles from home. These guys were running the country, the world; they were the commander in chief and one of the most famous and revered soldiers the country had ever produced. The answer to my question was familiar: bad intelligence about the local people, arrogance and hubris, cover-up to hide the many misjudgments and mistakes. The usual.
It didn't start in Iraq. It didn't start in Vietnam. It didn't start in Korea, when the United States, with United Nations backing, threw itself into a civil war -- and then, through MacArthur's Icarus-high hubris, drew Communist China into the field where they slaughtered American boys and were slaughtered in return -- this in a war that ended where it began, at the 38th parallel, the arbitrary line that divided North and South Korea. So it goes.
Perhaps where all this actually began was in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Commodore George Dewey drove the Spaniards away from their great Pacific colony. Accepting that the United States did not want to be a colonial power, President William McKinley did have a sense of religious mission that the Protestant United States had a godly obligation to save Filipinos -- "our little brown brothers," he called them -- from colonialism and from Spanish Catholicism.
So, bearing the white man's burden, we sent 112,000 troops. Many stayed there for almost 50 years, gallantly killing 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 250,000 civilians, "******s," as we called them. (We lost 4,200 soldiers and Marines.)
The Great White Father, McKinley, watched what was happening and later told a friend: "If old Dewey had just sailed away after he after he smashed the Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us."
Ellie
By Richard Reeves
Fri Sep 28, 7:58 PM ET
BERLIN -- Here is a report from the front. The writer is an Army colonel:
"We are bitter about the whole thing. We fight desperately for all we're worth; not only because our course is right, but also because we're fighting for our survival. But is all seems so useless and stupid. To 'liberate,' we're destroying (the country) and its people. They all hate us. Everyone here is an enemy. We can't trust anyone. ... I feel more and more that we have made a supreme error in committing our forces to this bottomless pit."
Not Iraq. That is a letter from Korea, from Col. Paul Freeman (later a four-star general), commander of the 325th Regiment, 2nd Division, U.S. Army, to his wife, Mary Anne, on Sept. 12, 1950. It is on page 586 of "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War," the last and very powerful book written by the late David Halberstam, which was published this week.
In the introduction, Halberstam writes of going into the public library in Key West, Fla., and seeing that there were 88 books on the war in Vietnam but only four on the Korean War. He notes: "To the degree that the Korean War ever had a niche in popular culture, it was through the Robert Altman anti-war movie (and then sitcom) M*A*S*H, about a mobile surgical hospital operating during that war. Ostensibly about Korea, the film was really about Vietnam, and came out in 1970, at the high-water mark of popular protest against that war."
And "The Coldest Winter" is really about Iraq and Vietnam.
I was home from school -- sick, I guess -- on June 30, 1950, when a black-and-white map of the Korean peninsula appeared on our little Philco television screen. The rotten communists in North Korea had invaded the good guys of South Korea. Soon enough a voice from somewhere mentioned things like the 38th parallel and said that U.S. troops would soon be there to teach the Reds a lesson they would never forget.
"Yes!" I thought or maybe shouted. Finally! It seems I was not alone. President Harry Truman was saying, "By God, I'm going to let them have it!" The commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, the immortal Douglas MacArthur, came to see it as a chance to destroy Red China. So did I, of course, but I was a 12-year-old boy who thought America was invincible.
"How could that be?" I thought as I read the book here thousands of miles from home. These guys were running the country, the world; they were the commander in chief and one of the most famous and revered soldiers the country had ever produced. The answer to my question was familiar: bad intelligence about the local people, arrogance and hubris, cover-up to hide the many misjudgments and mistakes. The usual.
It didn't start in Iraq. It didn't start in Vietnam. It didn't start in Korea, when the United States, with United Nations backing, threw itself into a civil war -- and then, through MacArthur's Icarus-high hubris, drew Communist China into the field where they slaughtered American boys and were slaughtered in return -- this in a war that ended where it began, at the 38th parallel, the arbitrary line that divided North and South Korea. So it goes.
Perhaps where all this actually began was in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Commodore George Dewey drove the Spaniards away from their great Pacific colony. Accepting that the United States did not want to be a colonial power, President William McKinley did have a sense of religious mission that the Protestant United States had a godly obligation to save Filipinos -- "our little brown brothers," he called them -- from colonialism and from Spanish Catholicism.
So, bearing the white man's burden, we sent 112,000 troops. Many stayed there for almost 50 years, gallantly killing 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 250,000 civilians, "******s," as we called them. (We lost 4,200 soldiers and Marines.)
The Great White Father, McKinley, watched what was happening and later told a friend: "If old Dewey had just sailed away after he after he smashed the Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us."
Ellie