by James Glaser
May 5,2004

It is pretty devastating when you read about what kind of losses we had last month in our battle for Fullujah. It is now being reported that we had 138 killed and over 1,000 wounded. The United States Marine Corps got beat ... bad.

What makes this beating so bad is that to end the fighting the Marines were forced to call in an Iraqi General who fought for Saddam Hussein.

Major General Jassim Mohammed Saleh, commanded one of Saddam's Republican Guard Divisions and when he drove into Fallujah he was wearing his old uniform and had the outlawed old Iraqi flag. The insurgents in the city cheered.

There were photos of this General in every American paper and the next day the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers said that General Saleh wasn't given the job of over seeing Fallujah. In defeat, we are also in disarray.

At the same time that the Marines were admitting defeat, the story of the prison abuse came out and that has taken over the media. Fallujah was attacked by us in order to inflict some revenge for the four American mercenaries that were killed there last month. We said we wanted to arrest their killers, of course we had no idea of who these killers were.

So we ended up dropping 1,000 and 500 pound bombs on a city filled with civilians. We called in C- 130 gun ships and attack helicopters. One major political problem we didn't think about was the fact that Arab news people were in the city filming our killing of civilians. Now the Muslim world has a film documentary showing how Marine snipers were targeting innocent civilians. They have films showing women and children lying dead in pools of their own blood.

If we haven't lost the War we have certainly lost any chance of convincing the Muslim world that we went to Iraq to bring freedom or anything else. With what has been shown about our abuse of the Iraqi men we hold in prisons and our killing hundreds of innocent people in Fallujah, we don't have any chance of spreading anything in the Middle East, other than hate.

We have lost this War and we are now the Bad Guys. It doesn't matter what Saddam Hussein did, because we are now doing the same thing. Today there was a report about an American that was convicted in a Military Court for killing an Iraqi prisoner and what did he get? He got busted to Private and a discharge. He murdered an Iraqi prisoner and walks away with no prison time. There is also a CIA Agent convicted too, I haven't heard what he got, but you know every Middle East news outlet is printing this story and explaining that nothing happens to Americans who murder Iraqis.

I would be willing to bet that the people who tortured the Iraqi prisoners will get almost no punishment. Oh, some low ranking soldiers will get something, but the real criminals, the people who ordered the torture will walk away like the first seven. They got Official Reprimands in their Service Record.

I know that War can make people do crazy things, but the people sitting in air-conditioned offices, who think all this stuff up should go to jail. Most of them are not even in Iraq.

Who ever decided to attack a city like Fallujah, with its hundreds of thousands of civilians should be tried as a war criminal. Not only did he or her get hundreds of innocent Iraqis killed, but think about all the Americans killed and the hundreds that are maimed for life. All we were trying to do is show the Iraqi people how tough we are. I hate to say it, but I think the Iraqi people proved that they are tough too.

Four American mercenaries got killed and I feel sorry for their families, but they were in Iraq killing people for money, so I don't feel too bad for them. "What comes around goes around."

Some stupid person decided we couldn't let the Iraqi people get away with that so instead of doing some police work and finding who killed those guys, we sent in the Marines and in total, Americans and Iraqis, a thousand were killed and maybe two thousand or more were wounded. Stupid, just like this war is stupid.

Post Script

It takes a Big man to admit his mistakes and I doubt if George Bush or any body else in the White House is Big enough to admit we screwed up big time in Iraq. In the years to come many Americans will pay for George Bush's War with their lives. Most young warriors the world over now know that we fight without honor. Hey, that was a myth anyway.