If the month of March has some significance for the region, then it should be remembered as the month that US forces under the command of President George W. Bush invaded Iraq under the pretext of stopping Iraq's deadly intention to annihilate the United States with weapons of mass destruction. It has since been proven that there never were any weapons of mass destruction, and the agenda behind that unilateral invasion without UN sanctions was an act of hostility against a country that had no link to the events of the bombing of New York's World Trade Center. The ill effects of that illegal aggression have spread far and wide with countless innocent civilians losing their lives in the process in the period that followed. Today, some of the region's turbulent dynamics can trace their roots back to that unfortunate episode. Ten years later, Tomas Young, a dying young US soldier who served in the war against Iraq wrote a letter to the perpetrators of that illegitimate act. In the letter titled "A Message to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from a Dying Veteran", he wrote: “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. 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. I write this letter on behalf of the some one 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. “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. “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. “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.” Tomas Young died on November 10, 2014 as a result of a bullet to the spine while deployed in Iraq. The architects of the immorality against the Iraqi people meanwhile have yet to be brought to justice. Tragic, isn't it?
— The author can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @talmaeena
