I haven’t posted specifically about the war for quite a while.
I find the subject rather difficult and have found it so since November 13th when I read an informative report about the Red Cross bombing in Baghdad by photo/journalist Michael Kamber and posted on the equally interesting DigitalJournalist.org.
His evocative reporting was additional confirmation of the hellish and largely unreported world our innocent middle-class young men and women on active duty in Iraq deal with every day.
Secretary O’Neill’s revelations and the recent Army War College Report should be a sobering wake-up call to a nation seething with equal measures of apathy and concern.
I was shocked by Command’s conduct of the ground advance into Iraq and the subsequent blurring of that conduct as Baghdad’s rubble was reduced to even smaller debris until a statue kinda fell amid a flurry of manna-like color Xerox.
The end of the war's first week satellite phone crack-down and the battlefield firing of Marine 1 Commander Colonel Joe Dowdy as troops stalled amid rumors of limited supplies was my pre-yellowcake Damascus moment of realization that the Iraq war was a complete fake, a gambit for empire, privatization and political hegemony.
As the days passed no national media has ever mentioned or printed Colonel Dowdy’s name or interviewed his family.
In mid April of 2003, this elite Marine commander and any version of reality that differed with Washington’s pre-sold chicken hawk concepts helicoptered into a Kuwaiti oblivion.

Callers to C-SPAN occasionally mention the Colonel’s name to congressional guests on the morning Journal.
The Congressmen always nod sagely and promise to “check into it”.

I remember House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer, after being asked, promising to bring the matter of Colonel Dowdy’s status to the head of the House Armed Services Subcommittee.
I’ve read or observed nothing to indicate that Hoyer or any of the other handful of Congressmen did as they promised while on the air.
Almost everyday Dowdy’s name is Googled.
I know this because my blog, sadly, often appears as a top hit.
Do It.
Google “Colonel Joe Dowdy” and see for yourself.
Everything is dated the end of the first week of Iraq war.
Does anyone seriously expect me to believe Diane Sawyer or any of the other media sob sisters would pass up an opportunity to have a good cry with Dowdy’s wife?

I know my September 11th Post Traumatic Stress effect is still lingering as I start to tear up if I even glimpse or hear videotape of a returning soldier hugging wives and family.
The pitiful whimpering sounds I hear the wives making as they embrace their husbands evokes the deep emotion that was so palpable after September 11 and still surprisingly lingers.
Bush’s shameful and ever more obvious prostitution of the presidency, his historically careless conduct of the nation’s business and his cavalier disregard of blood, treasure and Church/State separations are deeply shocking.
As a young man I seriously disliked Nixon but I never for one moment imagined that in a moment of national crisis he would fail to put America’s interests first.
His resignation, however forced, proved his warped love of country.
From Karl’s latest wildly ill-conceived Martian confection to the President’s un-American Faith Based Initiatives to the Iraq sideshow in the War on Terror, Mr. Bush forces a deliberate circumspection for I know he will accept any price while forcing the American people to bear any burden in his misuse of Liberty.

Photos: Reuters, San Francisco Chronicle, The Art Newspaper, The USMC and hoyer.house.gov
- posted by Sean @ 7:51 PM