The open letter below to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney from terminally ill Iraq War veteran Tomas Young was first published on Truthdig.com, and you can follow this link to read an interview with the 33-year-old conducted at his home earlier this month. /Claudia Cuellar photo
At the very birth of democracy in Greece more than 2,000 years ago, the Athenian leader Pericles stood before his fellow citizens to eulogize the dead from the first battles of the decades-long conflict known as the Peloponnesian War. Pericles proclaimed a truth that has been essential to every democracy ever since: It is sometimes necessary to lay lives on the line to preserve a democratic state and the citizenry owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to those lost in the struggle:
"You must yourselves realize the power of Athens, and feed your eyes upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valor, but they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer."
If you are a U.S. citizen, you should find Iraq War veteran Tomas Young's letter below deeply disturbing. Regardless of your opinion about the war, a democracy is unlikely to survive if those who answer the call to defend it feel abandoned by their fellow citizens.
The Last Letter
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 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.
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.
