By Jueseppi B.

 

 

 

MoveOn members began organizing against the war in Iraq more than 10 years ago. Here are a few photos of that courageous, important work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Iraq War began 10 years ago today.

 

 

The Iraq War: George W. Bush‘s Speech 10 Years Later

 

Published on Mar 19, 2013

 

MoveOn members helped fuel the most significant antiwar movement in 30 years before the invasion began. We saw through the deception and refused to buy the warmongering that the Bush administration was selling.

 

We locked arms with veterans who chose to speak out, longtime peace activists, and the few brave politicians who said no to war. We marched, rallied, and camped out. We held bake sales and vigils, and recruited a generation of progressive activists to pressure the politicians, the pundits, and our communities to stand up for peace. We made memories and friends as we demanded an end to the war.

 

This tidal wave of grassroots action—and the electoral work that followed—helped bring the war to an end. So today, we want to pause and ask: 10 years later, what’s one moment you remember from the movement to stop the Iraq war?

 

Maybe it was a community meeting you attended, or a vigil at your place of worship. Maybe it was honking your car horn as you drove by the group of protesters who demonstrated in the park every Tuesday. Or maybe you were one of those weekly protesters.

 

Whatever your best memory, share your story and what it taught you. We will build a stronger progressive movement by learning from our past and telling our history the way we experienced it.

 

 

Click here to share one moment you remember from the movement to end the war in Iraq—and see what others are sharing.

 

 

We must also reflect on the 6,630 servicemen and women—friends, family members, and complete strangers—we lost. The more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians. The thousands wounded or traumatized with scars that will take generations to heal. And the trillions of dollars wasted.

 

Millions organized to prevent people from losing their lives, and to honor the people who survived. People like Tomas Young, the 33 year-old Iraq veteran who was one of the first veterans to speak out against the war. Tomas was paralyzed on April 4, 2004, five days after he was deployed to a country he felt we should never have invaded. Today, Tomas is at home with his wife in Kansas City, MO, where he’s now in hospice care and awaits his last breath.

 

Here’s what Chris Hedges wrote about Tomas last week:

Young will die for our sins. He will die for a war that should never have been fought. He will die for the lies of politicians. He will die for war profiteers. He will die for the careers of generals. He will die for a cheerleader press. He will die for a complacent public that made war possible. He bore all this upon his body. He was crucified. And there are hundreds of thousands of other crucified bodies like his in Baghdad and Kandahar and Peshawar and Walter Reed medical center. Mangled bodies and corpses, broken dreams, unending grief, betrayal, corporate profit, these are the true products of war. Tomas Young is the face of war they do not want you to see.

 

We organized because we never wanted Tomas and so many others to go to war, and we honor him by continuing to demand a rapid end to the war in Afghanistan, and stand up against any move to launch a military attack on Iran.

 

 

Mr. Tomas Young……..

 

 

 

 

03/19/2013

 

To: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney
From: Tomas Young

 

I write this letter on the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War on behalf of my fellow Iraq War veterans. I write this letter on behalf of the 4,488 soldiers and Marines who died in Iraq. I write this letter on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of veterans who have been wounded and on behalf of those whose wounds, physical and psychological, have destroyed their lives. I am one of those gravely wounded. I was paralyzed in an insurgent ambush in 2004 in Sadr City. My life is coming to an end. I am living under hospice care.

 

I write this letter on behalf of husbands and wives who have lost spouses, on behalf of children who have lost a parent, on behalf of the fathers and mothers who have lost sons and daughters and on behalf of those who care for the many thousands of my fellow veterans who have brain injuries. I write this letter on behalf of those veterans whose trauma and self-revulsion for what they have witnessed, endured and done in Iraq have led to suicide and on behalf of the active-duty soldiers and Marines who commit, on average, a suicide a day. I write this letter on behalf of the some 1 million Iraqi dead and on behalf of the countless Iraqi wounded. I write this letter on behalf of us all—the human detritus your war has left behind, those who will spend their lives in unending pain and grief.

 

You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

 

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

 

Your positions of authority, your millions of dollars of personal wealth, your public relations consultants, your privilege and your power cannot mask the hollowness of your character. You sent us to fight and die in Iraq after you, Mr. Cheney, dodged the draft in Vietnam, and you, Mr. Bush, went AWOL from your National Guard unit. Your cowardice and selfishness were established decades ago. You were not willing to risk yourselves for our nation but you sent hundreds of thousands of young men and women to be sacrificed in a senseless war with no more thought than it takes to put out the garbage.

 

I joined the Army two days after the 9/11 attacks. I joined the Army because our country had been attacked. I wanted to strike back at those who had killed some 3,000 of my fellow citizens. I did not join the Army to go to Iraq, a country that had no part in the September 2001 attacks and did not pose a threat to its neighbors, much less to the United States. I did not join the Army to “liberate” Iraqis or to shut down mythical weapons-of-mass-destruction facilities or to implant what you cynically called “democracy” in Baghdad and the Middle East. I did not join the Army to rebuild Iraq, which at the time you told us could be paid for by Iraq’s oil revenues. Instead, this war has cost the United States over $3 trillion. I especially did not join the Army to carry out pre-emptive war.

 

Pre-emptive war is illegal under international law. And as a soldier in Iraq I was, I now know, abetting your idiocy and your crimes. The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history. It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure. And it was you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who started this war. It is you who should pay the consequences.

 

I would not be writing this letter if I had been wounded fighting in Afghanistan against those forces that carried out the attacks of 9/11. Had I been wounded there I would still be miserable because of my physical deterioration and imminent death, but I would at least have the comfort of knowing that my injuries were a consequence of my own decision to defend the country I love. I would not have to lie in my bed, my body filled with painkillers, my life ebbing away, and deal with the fact that hundreds of thousands of human beings, including children, including myself, were sacrificed by you for little more than the greed of oil companies, for your alliance with the oil sheiks in Saudi Arabia, and your insane visions of empire.

 

I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul.

 

My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.

 

—Tomas Young

 

 

 

So the work continues. Right now, click here to share one memory from the movement to end the war.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Bad News, Causes, Congress, Court Room/Legal, Crime, Democrats/Democratic, Disaster, DOJ, Dumb Shit, Education, Event, Foreign Polocy, GOPukes/RepubliCANTS, Gun Control, Gun Violence, History, Holidays, News, Photographs, Politics, POTUS Obama, Speech, Stories, Videos, War & the Military, World News Tagged: | Body of War, Chris Hedges, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Iraq, Iraq War, Sadr City, The Iraq War Began 10 Years Ago Today, Tomas Young