Four Tragic Years

By Melody Drnach, Action Vice President

March 19, 2007

At this tragic conclusion of the fourth year of George W. Bush's war for oil and control of the Middle East, we grieve the loss of more than 3,200 U.S. soldiers and between 58,000 and 600,000 deaths of civilians in Iraq. The fact that we have no idea how many Iraqis have perished speaks volumes about this administration's concern for humanity.

As we rush through our lives, four years can pass in a flash, but for people living and serving in Iraq, four years can be a lifetime. Consider how long four years really is. A baby born in Iraq at the start of the war is now walking and talking, knowing only the sights and sounds of war. A sixteen-year-old, who was learning to drive the family car is now the 20-year-old service member learning to walk with a prosthetic leg. During these past four years, thousands of children have lost a parent, sibling, aunt, or cousin, and thousands of families have been changed tragically, forever, by this war of Bush's choice.

For four years, we have marched in cities across the country calling for peace, calling for an end to the war. Hundreds of thousands of peaceful people have held vigils in communities across the country and in cities and towns around the world. Since the war began, thousands of activists have visited members of Congress pleading for peace.

In November 2006, we the people, tired of the Republican leadership refusing to listen, elected a Democratic-led Congress — many were elected because they pledged to end the war and bring our troops home. Despite the nationwide cry for peace, the U.S. Senate failed on March 15, by a vote of 50 to 48, to pass legislation setting a deadline to begin bringing the troops home. The new Bush plan isn't working — unless the sorrowful deaths of the 73 soldiers who have fallen since the commencement of the "surge" are part of his "Mission Accomplished" strategy. We vow to continue to press members of Congress to end this war.

Women and War

Since 2002, NOW has consistently spoken out against the war, and the fact that women, both in Iraq and in the U.S., are disproportionately affected by war. As the Bush administration rushed to invade, we knew that women and children in Iraq would suffer the horrors of war, and that young women and men would die needlessly in pursuit of oil and revenge. We could only hope, in the face of greed and aggression, that our military leaders would fulfill their responsibility to protect the women under their command and the women of Iraq from rape, sexual assault and harassment by U.S. soldiers. Their leadership has failed us.

Rape and sexual assault of both U.S. servicewomen and Iraqi civilians has been extensively reported, and evidenced by military tribunals. As predicted, Iraqi life in many areas has degenerated into bloody chaos, fear and despair. Hatred of the United States, because of our policies, has deepened, and women have been driven, in terror, inside their homes or have been forced to flee their country. The full story of the rape, sexual assault and harassment has yet to be told by women in the military, though it has started to come out in the mainstream press. NOW calls for an inquiry into the treatment of both U.S. and Iraqi women and for full Congressional investigations.

Depleting our Treasury

Prior to the start of the war, NOW issued a statement warning of the potential cost. In it we cautioned: "The cost of a war in Iraq would do serious harm to an already faltering US economy. Members of Bush's own administration — former members, that is — have projected costs in the hundreds of billions. Bush can only increase military spending at the expense of domestic programs — many of which assist women, people of color and all low-income families struggling to get by in these disastrous economic times."

Now, more than $400,000,000,000 later, the Bush administration continues using "fuzzy accounting" to pour money into the war machine, leaving low-income women and families, survivors of Hurricane Katrina, people who lost jobs to outsourcing, and countless others behind, fighting for the dwindling domestic programs and resources.

Our call has remained virtually unchanged since 2003, when NOW and thousands of members urged the Congress to withhold any funding for the war without the following provisions:

1. A guarantee of the welfare and safety of the Iraqi people;
2. A realistic exit strategy and full transfer of authority from the United States to the United Nations;
3. The resignation of those responsible for misleading the public and mismanaging of Iraq — beginning with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld;
4. A complete rollback of Bush's unfair and irresponsible tax scheme which, in combination with dramatic military spending, has plunged our country into astounding levels of debt that will be felt for generations to come; and
5. The withholding of further contracts with Halliburton and any other company with ties to the Bush administration.

Before this war began, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the country that the war would be short, Iraqi resistance would be limited and Iraqi citizens would be welcoming. Instead we find ourselves led by an administration that is four years older but none the wiser, with hundreds of thousands of people who are forever damaged both physically and mentally, countless thousands of families whose lives and relationships have been changed for the worse — in just four short years.

We have witnessed and experienced the calamitous effects of Bush's greedy and aggressive policies — from Rumsfeld's prediction of a war that would last less than six months to the development of a full-blown U.S.-fueled civil war with no logical endpoint. Now we have a Congress without the majority vote necessary to bring our troops home.

We are left, at the precipice of the fifth year, to ask: If not now, when will it end?