by James Glaser
March 4, 2003

No body wants to talk about this, not Washington nor the media. What if Saddam unleashes all the Weapons of Mass Destruction that George Bush keeps telling us Saddam has? There are many people that will tell you that America can't lose, after all we are the only Super Power. It would seem prudent to look at all the possibilities though. What If Saddan could kill, let's say 15,000 Americans. Would we still have a victory then? How about if we just lost 10,000, would that sound better?

People will hold up the last gulf war and say that we only lost 147 in combat and only 457 wounded. They will say Iraq was stronger then so we will lose less this time. I hope and pray that is true, but these same people are not being quite that honest with these numbers.

You see immediately after out troops came home from that First Gulf War, they started to get sick. Much like the abuse suffered by Vietnam Veterans at the hands of the Veterans Administration, these Gulf War Veterans were told that their sickness was all in their heads. Many of those same people that have signs telling us to support the troops were then saying that here was another group looking for free handouts from Uncle Sam.

What was so hard for these naysayers to explain is the fact that men with great jobs and fine futures ahead of them were confined to wheel chairs and they were dying. So far over 7.000 of the men and women who fought in that war have died from this strange illness that they brought home with them.

I first learned about how this sickness is now named Gulf War Illness, on Lew Rockwell's web page, in an article written by Colonel David H. Hackworth. Colonel Hackworth explained that as of last fall 7,758 veterans of the Gulf War were dead and 156,031 of those same Veterans are now permanently disabled from that illness. He went on to say that every day more of these veterans were getting sick and after spending 150 million dollars, we still didn't know what had caused this illness.

Well Colonel Hackworth is not some left wing antiwar zealot, but he is a patriot American that has fought for our country and is now ready to stand up and tell America that he supports our troops. Letting America know what happened in the last Gulf War to our men and women in the service, might just save thousands of these new veterans from suffering the same fate.

George Bush, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfled never bring up these casualties. In fact, what has happened to these tens of thousands of veterans is never mentioned by anyone. It makes our last victory over Saddam seem quite a bit more expensive and if the American public thought the same could happen again, they might not support this war as much as the do now.

So Washington and the main stream media will continue to ignore this story. George Bush will continue to cut the Veterans Hospital's budget and after this new war every one will say, "we didn't know."

Post Script Today my National Veterans of Foreign Wars magazine arrived and on page 10 there is an article that states 572,520 veterans served in the Gulf War and as of August 2002 161,700 of these veterans have been granted disability because of the strange illness they returned home with.