Staying the course to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan

By Carlton E. Spitzer

    Three years ago Iraqi Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Congress that the bitter ethnic violence severely complicated efforts to stabilize daily life in Iraq and restore its infrastructure.   “It’s very complicated,” he lamented.   He makes similar statements today regarding Afghanistan.

    Seated beside him three years ago, General David Petraeus told Congress that progress in Iraq was “fragile and reversible,” and urged that another 10,000 troops be added to the 140,000 already on the ground to buy time for a splintered Iraqi government to reconcile differences.  Differences have not been reconciled.  Now Petraeus urges us to stay the course in Afghanistan as he takes the reigns of the CIA.   A course to more of the same.

     Definitions of America’s enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan have changed with each passing year, from finding the now deceased Osama bin Laden and his terrorists to putting down the Shiite insurgents, to eliminating “special groups” allegedly backed by Iran.   We have invested blood and treasure in two wars that should not have been fought, yet out leaders seem determined to struggle on, with ever changing justifications. 

      Invading Iraqi was a grievous error, compounded by abysmal  management following the 2003 invasion that permitted militias to develop and ignited bitter ethnic violence. Unmentioned today are the huge payments to militias to have them side with our cause.  They did, as long as payments continued.  Billions in cash that flowed into Iraq cannot be accounted for.  We were conned.  And leaders at that time forgot that loyalty cannot be purchased and democracy cannot be imposed. 

      We continue to challenge Iran’s motives but refuse to talk to its officials as recommended by the Baker-Hamilton Report, which still gathers dust and is rarely mentioned in the halls of Congress. 

     We have lost our way.  As a measure of progress, Petraeus told Congress in 2008 that 50,000 Iraqis driven from Iraq by the invasion, and literally starving in Syria, had returned to their homes in Iraq, but he failed to mention that several million remained in exile, that Iraqi hospitals lacked basic medicines, or that electricity throughout Baghdad was spasmodic at best.  Electrical power is still available only a few hours each day.

      Ethnic violence has resurfaced in Iraq.  Makeshift roadside bombs continue take the lives of our troops and Iraqi citizens.  We have had thousands of troops on the ground there for almost nine years.  Keeping them there for another year, or two, or three will not change the historic ethnic divisions within Iraq.

      The people protesting peacefully for freedom in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria were met with violent opposition from fearful despots who had controlled their lives for decades.  Our assistance to their people makes sense and supports the American values so often proclaimed.  Billions lost in fighting unnecessary wars might have been devoted to working with those nations to improve education, health, and more democratic forms of government of their own choosing. 

      The lives of thousands of our fighting men and women might have been saved, and our hospitals would not be filled today with amputees and brain damaged young men and women.  The lives of innocent civilians caught up in war would have been saved, and infrastructure and museums in Iraq would have been untouched.   We might have built new alliances rather than new enemies.

       Truth-telling is a necessary perquisite to intelligent dialogue that might lead to realistic decision-making.  Petraeus and Crocker are honorable men, but in 2008 they responded to Congress precisely within the parameters of  their  responsibilities at that time.  The result was incomplete and misleading analyses of a war without end.  Now two wars seemingly without end.

      The past decade has divided our nation.  We were united immediately after September 11, 2001, and much of the world stood with us.  Even Iran.   We squandered that support by labeling countries good or evil, for us or against us. And followed con man Ahmad Chalabi’s illusion of a new Iraq under his leadership for eight traumatic years while losing American lives every week trying to win some indefinable victory.  Chalabi was strongly supported by Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush, and endorsed by a cowed, acquiescent Congress. 

       Ten years after 9/11 we are a divided nation, weakened economically and philosophically, 

       Iraq and Afghanistan have been a cruel charade in the name of democracy.  Profits of the five largest oil companies have tripled since war began in Iraq. Halliburton and its satellite companies have reaped billions in profits, even for shoddy work and some work never completed.  Iraqi oil profits that Wolfowitz claimed would pay for invasion and occupation have been funneled to the black market. Control of oil fields continues to be debated in a fractured Iraqi legislature, whose members are lobbied intensely by America’s largest oil companies to make sure they have a large piece of the action.

      In his book, AMERICA: The Next Chapter, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska reminded us that the U.S. handed Chalabi tens of millions of dollars to feed his boastful ambitions.  The man who was to be our champion in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s removal has since been convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan.  The Bush administration was conned and America has paid handsomely for the embarrassment. 

      Subsequent uprisings of people in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya for peace have changed the rules of the game.  Their bravery in marching for freedom against tanks and mortar shells should inspire support from all freedom loving nations.  Not simply weapons to defend themselves, for they mean to protest peacefully, but structural support for the creation of democracies designed by the people of those nations, without strings or conditions.  How much wiser for America to invest in freedom than in weapons of war.   Those billions of dollars lost and unaccounted for in Iraq alone would be most helpful today.

      The Obama administration should face up to unintended consequences of this terrible folly and study the Baker-Hamilton recommendations, still valid and compelling.  Let’s talk to our alleged and self-proclaimed adversaries.  We have dealt smilingly with despots for oil.  We can deal intelligently with all nations for peace, never capitulating but always negotiating in good faith.   The bottom up crusade is already underway.

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FDR and Harry the prize fighter

In 1944, contemplating a fourth term in the White House, Franklin Roosevelt was a very ill man, suffering from angina, high blood pressure, gall stones and exhaustion.  He carried digitalis and stopped chain-smoking  only when his doctors demanded he cut back on tobacco and alcohol. Ten smokes a day, and one drink. He made it a tall one.

     His weight had dropped from 190 to 165 pounds and he slept 10 to 12 hours a day and sometimes nodded off at meetings.  His family and staff were distressed by the dark circles under his eyes and his chronic fatigue.  The man who had restored the nation’s health with a bold jobs program could not restore his own health.

     FDR’s doctors examined him often, marked their charts and offered little information.  He asked for none.  When the press raised questions about his health, they were assured the president was simply tired from overwork but physically sound and looking forward to his fourth campaign against Thomas Dewey of New York.  It was true that FDR’s mind was as sharp as ever, when he was alert.

     But his close friend and confidant, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley, a distant cousin who often stayed at the White House for days at a time, was deeply worried.  She had never seen the president so melancholy, restless and disinterested in reading briefing papers.   She insisted that he meet Harry Lenny, a former boxer and self-taught massage therapist in New York. She had never met Harry, but had heard great things about him from a friend and believed he could help the president regain his vigor.

      If the suggestion had come from anyone else, FDR might have brushed it off with a laugh.  But Daisy was the one person with whom he was totally at ease, without pretense or reservation.  And she didn’t hesitate to criticize.  She had listened patiently when he offered a noble explanation for wanting to “change the composition” of the Supreme Court, and then told him bluntly that trying to pack the Court was foolish and would bring down the wrath of members of his own party as well as his entrenched enemies.  Which it surely did.  So he paid attention when Daisy recommended that Harry Lenny treat him. 

       Staff members tried to dissuade Daisy from bringing Mr. Lenny into the White House, and gently reminded the president that while they all loved Daisy and agreed she was a comforting presence, she sometimes did ditzy things.  Like the day she and her friend Polly with the bright purple hair were guests at the Roosevelt family’s summer home at Campobello during a lunar eclipse.  Daisy and Polly came down for breakfast dressed in their finest clothes with suitcases packed, certain that the eclipse was about to end the world.

       But FDR waved off objections and agreed with Daisy that, like chicken soup, Mr. Lenny’s treatments couldn’t hurt and might help. 

       So it was that pugilist Harry Lenny became a guest at the White House, to the keen displeasure of FDR’s medical advisers, who stopped speaking to Daisy and tried their best to ignore Harry.  He was difficult to ignore as he  massaged FDR’s polio-withered legs for two hours each day.  Lenny concluded that the president’s problem came from his spleen, and claimed his treatments would rid the president of his gall stones. 

        For whatever reasons, perhaps psychological, FDR’s blood pressure dropped, his fatigue lessened, and he was able to campaign in an open car through Manhattan in the pouring rain as millions of New Yorkers lined the streets and waved from office windows. 

        Lenny returned to New York, and FDR, having handily defeated Dewey, traveled 14,000 miles by plane and ship to meet at Yalta with Joseph Stalin of Russia and Winston Churchill of Great Britain to discuss war strategies.  Stalin and Churchill were stunned by FDR’s appearance, and Churchill confided to an aide that he knew he was seeing his friend for the last time.

       When FDR returned, he sat while addressing a joint session of Congress, explaining that the long journey had tired him and he did not want to wear the ten pound braces on each leg that would enable him to stand while holding on to a podium. 

         He left Washington immediately to rest at his little home on Pine Mountain, Georgia near the Warm Springs polio rehabilitation center he had founded.  While working on a speech mid-day, as an artist painted his portrait, a cerebral hemorrhage ended his life.  Daisy remembered with a sad smile that the healthiest weeks FDR had known during the previous year were the ones when Harry Lenny the boxer was his private therapist. 

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 Carlton E. Spitzer

A new approach to defeating stigma

Stigma persists like an incurable cancer, penalizing persons with disabilities generation after generation, yet historians, sociologists, and psychologists have never come together in a concerted way to investigate why public attitudes toward disabled persons reflect fear and discomfort.   The only recent documentation  of unbridled prejudice and hate was compiled by Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich as it systematically murdered thousands of helpless disabled persons.  That horror has inspired disability rights activists for more than 60 years.

     The United Nations declared 1980 a global “Year of The Disabled Person,” to recognize the desperate plight of millions of physically, mentally and developmentally challenged men, women and children, chiefly in developing nations, shunned by their governments, ignored by their neighbors, and often abandoned by their families.

    In the United States that year, a White House Conference on The Disabled Person was convened to address issues of parity in education and employment.  Conferees recommended reasonable workplace accommodations and special equipment to enable qualified disabled persons to attend classes, seek employment in factories, shops and offices, and enter all the professions.

    The conference, designed and directed by disabled persons, was attended by thousands of other disabled persons from every corner of the nation.  The National Organization on Disability was born of that effort, and directed by its founder, Alan Reich, until his death in 2005.   It was Reich, scholar and former athlete, a quadriplegic from a diving accident, who addressed the United Nations General Assembly in his wheelchair and won approval for, “The Year of The Disabled Person.” 

    That international surge encouraged disabled persons to believe years of second class citizenship, blatant and subtle denial of opportunity, and inaccessible office buildings, restaurants and hotels, were coming to an end.  But it would take another decade to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act, and a second decade to assure its compliance.  It is still a work in progress.

    Even the government dragged its heels.  It wasn’t until 1968 that the late Hugh Gregory Gallagher, then administrative assistant to Senator Bob Bartlett of Alaska, drafted legislation assuring access to federal buildings for persons with disabilities.  Gallagher had tired of being stranded in the Senate parking garage until a passerby would hoist his wheelchair over a curb.  A ramp was installed.  That ramp was a symbol, for all progress has come slowly, and with great effort.

     In 2002, James D. Wolfensohn, then president of the World Bank and former chairman of the board of the International Federation of Multiple Sclerosis Societies, observed that 400 million disabled people in the world’s developing countries – about 20 percent of their populations - lived in poverty, isolation and despair.  Childhood diseases erased by inoculations in the United States continued to kill millions of infants in developing nations before their first birthday, he said, and polio, eradicated in the U.S. through vaccinations in the 1950s, still paralyzed and maimed thousands of children around the world despite the indefatigable efforts of the World Health Organization and Rotary International.

     Unless disabled people are brought into the mainstream, Wolfensohn warned, it would be impossible to cut poverty or give every boy and girl the chance to receive a primary education.  More than 180 world leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit in September, 2000, set those two goals for 2015.  In 2011, prospects seem slim. What is clear is that addressing disability issues is a significant part of reducing poverty.

    Even in the United States, discrimination and stigma still burden the lives of disabled persons, impeding their entry into the workplace, and limiting their access to transportation, housing, restaurants and places of entertainment.  They are restricted in ways that never occur to able-bodied people, and sometimes denied rights non-disabled persons take for granted. 

   On Maryland’s Mid Shore, the disAbility Coalition of Talbot County, Chesapeake Voyagers, the Chesapeake and Caroline Centers for developmental disabilities, the Mid Shore Mental Health Systems. The Mental Health Association in Talbot County,  and other service-provider organizations seek to improve the lives of persons with disabilities.  The Hugh Gregory Gallagher Motivational Theatre, Inc. raises public awareness of disability issues through dramatizations of real life experiences.  

    But we still have not established an ongoing international dialogue among anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, historians and disability advocates, with periodic summit meetings, to lift the burden of stigma from future generations. 

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Carlton E. Spitzer