Three Wrongs Don’t Make A Right

Wrong Enemy, Wrong Place, Wrong Information. Three wrongs don’t make a right.

Ten years ago, March 20, 2003, America invaded Iraq—the invasion was dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom. When I first heard about it, I was trying on clothes in a dressing room of a small shop in Vancouver. From the curtain that separated me from the main showroom, I overheard the sales clerk mention the shock and awe bombing that had begun. I started crying. The tears flowed uncontrollably. I wasn’t American. I didn’t know anyone who was involved. But I was thinking of all those young innocent men who would die in service, all those whose lives would shattered, all those families, forever changed. Based on what I’d heard, I believed at the time it was a crime for the old men in Washington to send innocent boys to a country that didn’t look like the enemy.

Perhaps many of you, like my husband, believed Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, when they said Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had weapons of mass destruction. I’d watched the news—prior to the invasion—and what I’d seen were UN weapons inspectors searching the country and finding nothing. They found no proof that Saddam was a danger to the western world, at least not enough to warrant an all-out war.

My husband, Rob, thought differently. He believed the American government rhetoric, and I have to admit it was pretty convincing. If you say something enough times, people start to believe it. Rob and I ended up arguing at great lengths about the wisdom of an invasion. There was even yelling; we were that passionate about our beliefs.

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We soon learned there were no weapons of mass destruction. The only weapons of mass destruction were the ones the Americans and their allies had brought in. Since America couldn’t find Osama Bin Laden, the instigator behind 9/11, it seemed America had successfully painted Saddam as the scapegoat. At the time, at least half of all Americans believed he was responsible for the 9/11 tragedy.

Over 3 Trillion was spent on this needless war.

But the lives lost and the lives maimed cannot be measured in dollars. In all, from 2003-2011, 4,802 US. and coalition military died and over 32,000 were wounded.

What’s surprising to me now, is the fact I was only thinking of the Americans. I wasn’t thinking about those poor Iraqis, who would suffer losses far greater than the Americans. Iraqi civilian deaths: over 114,000 (known); an indeterminate number of injured souls, and estimates of 400,000 to 870,000 orphans. Operation Iraqi Freedom indeed!

Those American and British ,who were wounded, came back as amputees, or they came back suffering from traumatic brain injury. Post traumatic stress was the other killer; 30% of those who’d served returned with mental illness. Back home, there were unexpected suicides, homicidal impulses and chronic nightmares. And then the report of an unusually high percentage of females in the field who were raped and/or sexually assaulted.

When these warriors returned home, they returned as ghosts, carrying the horrors of war with them. They went away whole and came home broken. Broken men ended up breaking families and breaking hearts. Many are still wandering the streets wondering what happened.

One of these valiant soldier talks today of his pain in an open letter to Bush and Cheney. It’s well worth reading A Dying Iraq War Veteran’s Letter. Who better to speak of the war than someone who was there?

I hope and pray that those who served can get the love and support they deserve. It wasn’t their fault they were sent to fight a war that shouldn’t have been fought in the first place. We had hoped the good guys would win. In the end, there were no good guys, only dead guys. The ones to blame are the ones who sent them in the first place.

Lest we forget.

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