Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Thinking about the war - five years on and counting

It's been five years since President Bush and his cohorts engineered the current war in Iraq. The multi-trillion dollar exercise hasn't gone well for the families of America. More than 4,000 of their sons and daughters have been killed and many more thousands have been physically and mentally incapacitated.

From time to time I've commented in these pages about the war. One of my essays, "Thinking about the war" was posted on October 25 2004. I mentioned that the US casualty figure had reached 1,200. There's certainly a lot of American, Iraqi and Afghan blood which has flowed beneath the proverbial bridge since then.

This week an American warship USS Tarawa called into Fremantle after a four month deployment in the Persian Gulf. I put some images of it online and to my surprise I received some grateful comments from family members of some of those sons and daughters who were aboard. I could tell from the few words that these anonymous folk sent that they will be very pleased to get their offspring back home safely. My parents were the same with me and my Vietnam tour with the Australian Army. (1966-67)

I posted another large panorama of the ship for these US parents to my Picasa site last night. Click the link at the end of this entry.

This is not to say I approve of what has happened with US foreign policy over the past five years. I'm appalled at the loss of life on all sides since the beginning of this ill-conceived war. I'm also appalled at the manner in which the US administration attacked the integrity of the Geneva Conventions and manipulated a proportion of the US citizenry to accept that systematic torture and murder was a legitimate strategy. The war has gone so badly for the US that a serious suggestion has emerged it could go for another hundred years. That's pretty appalling too.

I watched a long documentary on SBS last night titled, Taxi to the dark side. I now have it copied to a DVD. The film won an Academy Award earlier this year. It focussed of the systematic beating to death of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawa by American soldiers and the abandonment of ethical behaviour and human rights by senior military officers and the Bush administration.

According to its Wikipedia entry there was a significant effort to prevent the documentary reaching the eyes and minds of the American public. Many of the American soldiers who participated frankly admitted their involvement in atrocities.

Today comes disturbing news from the US National Security Archive that a significant number (millions) of White House emails covering the early stages of the Iraq War which by law were supposed to have been preserved, but have apparently been destroyed.

Obviously there are many Americans who have been outraged by these sort of matters. They would like to see certain members of the Bush administration prosecuted as criminals, but I don't suppose it will happen.

Anyway, here's the new panorama of USS Tarawa. Give it a click.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

Click here to see our backyard.

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!

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