Am-Bushed on Memorial Day

By Jerry Mazza
Jun. 01, 2007

While the millions back home were sunning themselves this Memorial Day at the beach, the lakes and mountains coast to coast, and members of Congress were chomping at their political barbecues, having given Bush another $100 billion to blow in Iraq, the boys (not the Bush girls), America’s boys and girls actually fighting had their worse day in two and a half years. According to the Washington Post, 10 American soldiers were killed on Memorial Day, surely a fitting mnemonic to help us all remember.

And speaking of memory, you may remember from your civics class how Memorial Day started in the summer of 1865, shortly after the Civil War, when we managed to butcher 600,000 of our own, still our highest American war casualty figure, to preserve the Union, and abolish the slavery that propped up the lucrative Southern agrarian economy.

On May 5, 1866, the village of Waterloo, New York, led by its mayor, Henry C. Welles, was decorated with flags at half-mast to honor the Civil War dead. Welles and Waterloo were joined in the following year by General John B. Murray, a civil war hero and patriot, who marched to martial music to the three village cemeteries to decorate soldiers’ graves, and also to honor the living survivors of the war. One year later, the observance was pushed back to May 30th, in keeping with the general’s orders, and has been held annually ever since.

On March 7, 1966, New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller (from one of our great robber baron families) recognized Waterloo’s event with an official proclamation. This was followed by recognition from Congress when the House and Senate unanimously passed House Concurrent Resolution 587 on May 17 and 19, 1966, respectively. Would that they could have acted with such unanimity to ban the further issuance of blood money to Bush? But the game doesn’t seem to work that way. It’s only after the murder that we bless the lost.

Speaking of that, ironically, on May, 26, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson, who personally helped bring us the Vietnam escalation with NSAM 273, which gave the generals full speed ahead to go North and bomb the Vietnamese back to the stone age . . . that same LBJ signed a Presidential Proclamation recognizing Waterloo as the Birthplace of Memorial Day. Whoopee for Waterloo!

What’s more, it seems we’ve found our own Waterloo in Iraq, as Johnson and later Nixon found theirs in Vietnam. Waterloo, for the unknowing, is where the megalomaniac Napoleon was defeated finally by the Britain’s Duke of Wellington and Prussia’s Gebhard von Blucher. Ironies upon ironies, rolling in like the waves of war dead.

And on this Memorial Day past, eight of the US deaths came when a US helicopter crashed in Diyala province north of Baghdad, killing two soldiers. The Post tells us “insurgents then ambushed a rapid response team that was arriving to rescue the troops, killing six other soldiers with a series of roadside bombs, said Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, a military Spokesmen.”

I say, with nearly as many military contractors as US soldiers in Iraq these days, including contract killers flying under the radar of military law, it is possible to imagine those insurgents, who may as well have been Iraqi freedom fighters, were not contractors designed to aggravate the situation. This would be done to feed the new neocon strategy of dumping the blame for any US deaths on these mealy-mouthed Democrats who won’t give them enough (which is never enough) money and troops to fight their Vietnam, their Waterloo, Iraq.

Recently, the neocons (Rove, Cheney, Bush, et al) have disowned their massive blunders, as they plan a stealthy withdrawal into the Green Zone Embassy super-compound and fortresses throughout Iraq, to claim a victory instead of the pathetic defeat they’ve created, and which the troops have suffered, not to mention the folks back home for whom this Memorial Day, bright as it could be, was suffused with gloom. One did not see as many flags flying, Bush bumper stickers, or Veterans of Foreign Wars stumping for more of the same. Who could blame them?

Perhaps the awful truth is seeping in with its miraculous cure, let’s call it a day and get the hell out of this hell that was created for us with disinformation. That is that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them, which has been proven treasonously false; and that Saddam was in league with Al Qaeda, which is also treasonously false. Hussein was a secular leader and Al Qaeda had its origins in fundamentalist jihad, most notably in Afghanistan, with the help of the CIA to organize, train and fund Muslim fighters to war against the Russian “atheistic infidels” who had been lured into invading in 1978-79.

Parenthetically, and for the unknowing, Saddam was supported and armed by George H. W. Bush, who knew exactly what a bastard Hussein was. But he was our bastard, and then set upon the Iranians like a pit-bull in an eight-year long war that caused a million deaths and displaced 2 million. That was a little bit of payback to Iran for attacking our embassy. Even though Ronald Reagan was able to negotiate a deal to bribe the Iranians with guns and money to release the prisoners, only after Jimmy Carter was defeated in the upcoming election. This was also treason, to bargain with the enemy against a standing president.

But then, given the not-too-distant history of Grandpa Prescott Bush financing the Nazis and the Third Reich till FDR put him and the Union Bank out of business in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, this must have made the Reagan deal seem like small potatoes. But it wasn’t. It was the beginning of the Iran-Contra scam, which funded the shadow government’s black ops from that day to this. Am-Bushed by Grandpa Bush, and again by GHW Bush, who let Saddam go at the end of Gulf I. This when Powell told GHWB he needed one more day to bring in the rogue Hussein. Why didn’t Poppy take him up on it? Perhaps his oil brothers didn’t want to “destabilize” the region and the flow of black gold. You better believe it.

Cutting back to Colonel Garver, military spokesmen, he commented, “They are an adaptive, difficult enemy with an ability to change tactics to adapt to what’s happening on the ground.” That seems like a sensible if deadly tactic, which one would think would discourage us from thinking mere “shock and awe,” the mindless dumping of super-bombs can win you a war fought on the streets, in the nooks and crannies of villages, on the lost dusty roads of Iraq’s no-man’s land.

For instance, Iraqi fighters attacked a US patrol and killed four soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter in a May 12 kidnapping, and escaped with three captive US solders. Quick reaction teams once again faced a number of roadside bombs delaying arrival at the scene. One kidnapped soldier was later found dead. Two remain missing. Who do we blame that on: the Democrats or the brutal idiots that framed this massive killing for oil and hegemonic domination?

Colonel Garver also tells us that in the case of the helicopter crash, it wasn’t clear if roadside bombs were there ahead of time or put in place after the helicopter went down. And was it even clear who put them there, to incite what further trouble? But not to worry, the cause of the crash is under investigation, just like Alberto’s prosecutor-fixing. How bout a nice bridge in Brooklyn? I can let you have it wholesale, like Army justice or a recent election.

Of course our own little Napoleon assured us last week that “We’re going to expect heavy fighting in the weeks and months [ahead]. We can expect more American and Iraqi casualties.” He added, “It could be a bloody -- it could be a very difficult August.” Well, isn’t that special? In spite of all this, Spokes-Colonel Garver tells us “that’s going to bring more stability,” that is, in the long run. “Being out with the Iraqi forces and earning the confidence of the people will lead to better cooperation with the population and separate them from the insurgents and make sure they’re on our side.” If you’re old enough to remember Vietnam’s ARVN rhetoric, this is just a sad rerun. Only it went on for 10 years, left two million Vietnamese dead, and 58,000 of our boys.

A tally by iCaualties.org, an independent website tracking US military deaths, reported that Monday’s deaths (not the euphemistic “fatalities”) now weighs in at 116 for May, the third-deadliest month of the war for US troops. The most lethal months, November and April 2004, weigh in with 137 and 135 American deaths. These occurred when the US military launched offensives against Sunni insurgents holding Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad.

And so you don’t think it’s just the US taking the hits, five British nationals from the Iraqi Finance Ministry were kidnapped shortly before 9 a.m. on Tuesday. Listen to this for chutzpah. 19 vehicles (white SUVs Iraqi police use) sped into the ministry compound in north Baghdad as the op was launched. The men in them were dressed in national police uniforms, and swept away their prizes. Among the captured were four security guards from GardaWorld (how bout that for a name), a Montreal-based security company. What the hell were they doing there?

A spokesman for a US “consulting firm,” Bearing Point, told the Brit Press Association that the client being guarded was one of their employees. You feel like these are Keystone Kops and the insurgents are fighting for real, for their lives, their land? But, we’re reassured that kidnapping numbers are dropping, and only six people had been kidnapped this year, that is before Tuesday’s lifts.

Also on Tuesday, some 24 folks were killed and 51 hurt when a minibus exploded in Tayaran Square, not quite a mall, but a crowded commercial district in central Baghdad where Shiites usually catch commuter buses to jobs in Sadr City. And later, a car bomb went off by remote control in the mixed Sunni/Shiite neighborhood of Amil, in southeast Baghdad, killing 20, inuring 23. Again, who do we really point the finger at here? Sunnis, Shiites, or our fixers?

So hey, we got lots to remember. Lots. But mainly that we have been Am-Bushed into this mess by the Bush administration, his oil honchos, defense manufacturers, and independent contractors, who cover everything from cutting throats, getting kidnapped to kidnapping others, or building lousy infrastructure that isn’t worth the sand the wind blows over it. But hey, it’s just our boys, our girls (not Bush’s), endless American and Iraqi blood, and endless, endless amounts of money that could be used for health care, paying down the debt, creating a sane and humane society and a sane world.

Is that too small potatoes for the big thinkers in Washington? I think so. So let’s impeach them. They’ve committed treason. Put it back on the table. And let’s take back the country from the Am-Bushers before there’s nothing left of it. Not even your barbecue grill, the aluminum chairs in the backyard and that nice magnolia tree you like to sit under and smell the bounty of nature under the beautiful summer-blue sky.

Remember, Memorial Day also is the informal beginning of summer, when things come back to life and bloom, not just die in destroyed corners of the world. This is when we as a nation should be family, not just Democrats or Republicans, and should come together and toast the Republic and its continuance as one, one multi-colored, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, polyglot America. Ain’t it beautiful? Ain’t it a fantastic idea? Don’t you just love it? I do, no matter what. And worth fighting for, beginning here. Or maybe in Waterloo, where the Civil War dead can still hear us.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York City. Reach him at [email protected].