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The Reason Why
George McGovern
From The
Nation
April 21, 2003
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson
"The Charge of
the Light Brigade" (in the Crimean War)
Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history
of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of
painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense
of the nation's true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as
Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other
functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid
Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient
press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has
set the nation on a course for one-man rule.
He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United
Nations and international law while creating a costly but
largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called
"Homeland Security." Meanwhile, such fundamental building
blocks of national security as full employment and a strong
labor movement are of no concern. The nearly $1.5 trillion tax
giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already
rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services
and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and
the elderly. This President and his advisers know well how to
get us involved in imperial crusades abroad while pillaging
the ordinary American at home. The same families who are
exploited by a rich man's government find their sons and
daughters being called to war, as they were in Vietnam--but
not the sons of the rich and well connected. (Let me note that
the son of South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is now on duty in
the Persian Gulf. He did not use his obvious political
connections to avoid military service, nor did his father seek
exemptions for his son. That goes well with me, with my fellow
South Dakotans and with every fair-minded American.)
The invasion of Iraq and other costly wars now being
planned in secret are fattening the ever-growing
military-industrial complex of which President Eisenhower
warned in his great farewell address. War profits are booming,
as is the case in all wars. While young Americans die, profits
go up. But our economy is not booming, and our stock market is
not booming. Our wages and incomes are not booming. While
waging a war against Iraq, the Bush Administration is waging
another war against the well-being of America.
Following the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, the entire world was united in sympathy and
support for America. But thanks to the arrogant unilateralism,
the bullying and the clumsy, unimaginative diplomacy of
Washington, Bush converted a world of support into a world
united against us, with the exception of Tony Blair and one or
two others. My fellow South Dakotan, Tom Daschle, the US
Senate Democratic leader, has well described the collapse of
American diplomacy during the Bush Administration. For this he
has been savaged by the Bush propaganda machine. For their
part, the House of Representatives has censured the French by
changing the name of french fries on the house dining room
menu to freedom fries. Does this mean our almost sacred Statue
of Liberty--a gift from France--will now have to be
demolished? And will we have to give up the French kiss? What
a cruel blow to romance.
During his presidential campaign Bush cried, "I'm a uniter,
not a divider." As one critic put it, "He's got that right.
He's united the entire world against him." In his brusque,
go-it-alone approach to Congress, the UN and countless nations
big and small, Bush seemed to be saying, "Go with us if you
will, but we're going to war with a small desert kingdom that
has done us no harm, whether you like it or not." This is a
good line for the macho business. But it flies in the face of
Jefferson's phrase, "a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind." As I have watched America's moral and political
standing in the world fade as the globe's inhabitants view the
senseless and immoral bombing of ancient, historic Baghdad, I
think often of another Jefferson observation during an earlier
bad time in the nation's history: "I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just."
The President frequently confides to individuals and
friendly audiences that he is guided by God's hand. But if God
guided him into an invasion of Iraq, He sent a different
message to the Pope, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, the
mainline Protestant National Council of Churches and many
distinguished rabbis--all of whom believe the invasion and
bombardment of Iraq is against God's will. In all due respect,
I suspect that Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz,
Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice--and other sideline
warriors--are the gods (or goddesses) reaching the ear of our
President.
As a World War II bomber pilot, I was always troubled by
the title of a then-popular book, God Is My Co-pilot.
My co-pilot was Bill Rounds of Wichita, Kansas, who was
anything but godly, but he was a skillful pilot, and he helped
me bring our B-24 Liberator through thirty-five combat
missions over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. I
give thanks to God for our survival, but somehow I could never
quite picture God sitting at the controls of a bomber or
squinting through a bombsight deciding which of his creatures
should survive and which should die. It did not simplify
matters theologically when Sam Adams, my navigator--and easily
the godliest man on my ten-member crew--was killed in action
early in the war. He was planning to become a clergyman at
war's end.
Of course, my dear mother went to her grave believing that
her prayers brought her son safely home. Maybe they did. But
how could I explain that to the mother of my close friend,
Eddie Kendall, who prayed with equal fervor for her son's safe
return? Eddie was torn in half by a blast of shrapnel during
the Battle of the Bulge--dead at age 19, during the opening
days of the battle--the best baseball player and pheasant
hunter I knew.
I most certainly do not see God at work in the slaughter
and destruction now unfolding in Iraq or in the war plans now
being developed for additional American invasions of other
lands. The hand of the Devil? Perhaps. But how can I suggest
that a fellow Methodist with a good Methodist wife is getting
guidance from the Devil? I don't want to get too
self-righteous about all of this. After all, I have passed the
80 mark, so I don't want to set the bar of acceptable behavior
too high lest I fail to meet the standard for a passing grade
on Judgment Day. I've already got a long list of strikes
against me. So President Bush, forgive me if I've been too
tough on you. But I must tell you, Mr. President, you are the
greatest threat to American troops. Only you can put our young
people in harm's way in a needless war. Only you can weaken
America's good name and influence in world affairs.
We hear much talk these days, as we did during the Vietnam
War, of "supporting our troops." Like most Americans, I have
always supported our troops, and I have always believed we had
the best fighting forces in the world--with the possible
exception of the Vietnamese, who were fortified by their
hunger for national independence, whereas we placed our troops
in the impossible position of opposing an independent Vietnam,
albeit a Communist one. But I believed then as I do now that
the best way to support our troops is to avoid sending them on
mistaken military campaigns that needlessly endanger their
lives and limbs. That is what went on in Vietnam for nearly
thirty years--first as we financed the French in their failing
effort to regain control of their colonial empire in Southeast
Asia, 1946-54, and then for the next twenty years as we sought
unsuccessfully to stop the Vietnamese independence struggle
led by Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap--two great men whom
we should have accepted as the legitimate leaders of Vietnam
at the end of World War II. I should add that Ho and his men
were our allies against the Japanese in World War II. Some of
my fellow pilots who were shot down by Japanese gunners over
Vietnam were brought safely back to American lines by Ho's
guerrilla forces.
During the long years of my opposition to that war,
including a presidential campaign dedicated to ending the
American involvement, I said in a moment of disgust: "I'm sick
and tired of old men dreaming up wars in which young men do
the dying." That terrible American blunder, in which 58,000 of
our bravest young men died, and many times that number were
crippled physically or psychologically, also cost the lives of
some 2 million Vietnamese as well as a similar number of
Cambodians and Laotians, in addition to laying waste most of
Indochina--its villages, fields, trees and waterways; its
schools, churches, markets and hospitals.
I had thought after that horrible tragedy--sold to the
American people by our policy-makers as a mission of freedom
and mercy--that we never again would carry out a needless,
ill-conceived invasion of another country that had done us no
harm and posed no threat to our security. I was wrong in that
assumption.
The President and his team, building on the trauma of 9/11,
have falsely linked Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that tragedy and
then falsely built him up as a deadly threat to America and to
world peace. These falsehoods are rejected by the UN and
nearly all of the world's people. We will, of course, win the
war with Iraq. But what of the question raised in the Bible
that both George Bush and I read: "What does it profit a man
to gain the whole world and lose his own soul," or the soul of
his nation?
It has been argued that the Iraqi leader is hiding a few
weapons of mass destruction, which we and eight other
countries have long held. But can it be assumed that he would
insure his incineration by attacking the United States? Can it
be assumed that if we are to save ourselves we must strike
Iraq before Iraq strikes us? This same reasoning was
frequently employed during the half-century of cold war by
hotheads recommending that we atomize the Soviet Union and
China before they atomize us. Courtesy of The New Yorker, we
are reminded of Tolstoy's observation: "What an immense mass
of evil must result...from allowing men to assume the right of
anticipating what may happen." Or again, consider the words of
Lord Stanmore, who concluded after the suicidal charge of the
Light Brigade that it was "undertaken to resist an attack that
was never threatened and probably never contemplated." The
symphony of falsehood orchestrated by the Bush team has been
de-vised to defeat an Iraqi onslaught that "was never
threatened and probably never comtemplated."
I'm grateful to The Nation, as I was to
Harper's, for giving me opportunities to write about
these matters. Major newspapers, especially the Washington
Post, haven't been nearly as receptive.
The destruction of Baghdad has a special poignancy for many
of us. In my fourth-grade geography class under a superb
teacher, Miss Wagner, I was first introduced to the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers, the palm trees and dates, the kayaks plying
the rivers, camel caravans and desert oases, the Arabian
Nights, Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp (my first movie), the
ancient city of Baghdad, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent.
This was the first class in elementary school that fired my
imagination. Those wondrous images have stayed with me for
more than seventy years. And it now troubles me to hear of
America's bombs, missiles and military machines ravishing the
cradle of civilization.
But in God's good time, perhaps this most ancient of
civilizations can be redeemed. My prayer is that most of our
soldiers and most of the long-suffering people of Iraq will
survive this war after it has joined the historical march of
folly that is man's inhumanity to man.
Read
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The on-line database Iraq Body Count has published detailed evidence
of at least 200 civilians killed by coalition cluster bombs since
the start of the Iraq War. The Pentagon has admitted only one
recorded case of a civilian death from cluster munitions in Iraq
this year. This extraordinarily low number has been greeted with
widespread incredulity. Since the start of hostilities Iraq Body
Count has been building up a meticulous and exhaustive compilation
of every reported civilian death in Iraq caused by coalition
military action. It has based its work on corroborated reports in
key media sources published worldwide. The research team has updated
its estimates on a daily basis by adding to a constantly growing
on-line data-base which now reports over 100 separate incidents
involving up to 2700 civilian deaths in total. Among these incidents
are included reliable reports of at least 200 civilian deaths due to
cluster bombs, with up to a further 172 deaths which were probably
caused by cluster bombs. Of these 372 deaths, 147 have been caused
by detonation of unexploded or "dud" munitions, with around half
this number being children. Full details are 
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