This weekend I was invited to join two other guest speakers as we dedicated a new Veterans Memorial Park in the small town of Odessa in Schuyler County, 30 minutes to the north of Watkins Glen in the Finger Lakes region of Western New York State. The request came from the driving force behind the five year project to locate, fund and build this monument - the center piece of which of is a strikingly beautiful bronze statue of a mother eagle protecting two young.
The symbolism and sheer size of the bronze is impressive in and of itself and the multi-acre park, located on property donated by a local family, has now been cleared to create a park for future family and commemorative events. This centerpiece, created by sculptor David Turner, represents freedom, courage and strength. The sculpture was made possible through a donation by county residents Bob Sand and Fred Sibley. Not a single penny of government money was utilized in this community effort. It was the product of thousands of hours of volunteer effort and hard work.
I was asked to participate and give brief remarks on what the word "strength" means relevant to the commemoration of Memorial Day. We arrived at what I thought would be a small, almost private, ceremony to find New York State Police out in full numbers as the crowd swelled to more than a thousand people of all ages and with uniforms, and pieces of uniforms, representing every conflict from World War Two through today's conflicts.
After checking in with several members of the host committee I saw an elderly man, in the Full Dress Uniform of a Marine Sergeant Major, with enough hash marks on his sleeve to represent at least 36 years of military service. After I shook his hand and returned a crisp salute from someone who was clearly twice my age, I realized from his service ribbons that he had served in one of two units in the Pacific theater of World War Two. And after he told me he was with the 5th Marine Division, I knew that he had been on Iwo Jima, a small and fanatically bloody island campaign that marked the near end of the Pacific War. Iwo was a small volcanic island that was selected for invasion for the sole reason that we desperately needed a base for returning and damaged B-29 Superfortresses to make emergency landings. Sergeant Major Lupold went ashore in a combat company of more than 200 men, the majority in their teens. And of these less than thirty left the island and of those, half were injured.
The odds were incredibly stacked against this now 80-something man standing there -- in the light drizzle -- standing there to help commemorate that terrible loss of life in a far away and distant conflict. And yet, here I was, invited to speak about "strength" to an audience that included the likes of this long retired Sergeant Major. As I took the podium I wasn't sure what I would say. As I looked out across the field, now full of an audience which no doubt was wondering what I would say - I thought that the best way to tell the story of Memorial Day was to tell the story of Sergeant Major Lupold.
Now, this evening - away from that commemoration and free, once again, to express my political beliefs, it strikes me that we are in a struggle, a struggle that a very small oligarchy of civilians, the vast majority of which never wore the uniform of the United States, have committed us to. We, as a nation, were first told that we were in imminent danger of being attacked by nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. When it became clear that the initial justification for our current war was not accurate, we were then told that we needed to invade Iraq to create a regime change as the government of Iraq was evil and was engaged in acts of genocide against their own people.
This all came from the very same hypocritical political leaders who assaulted our commanders for leading NATO into stopping the worst ongoing genocide since WWII as the military operations by NATO in Kosovo stopped the slaughter of 1.5 million Kosovar Albanians. Last week, General Wesley K. Clark, at whose side I was honored to serve, was greeted with flowers on his return to Kosovo at the invitation of Kosovo's Prime Minister Agim Ceku. You can read about it here on Kos.
General Wesley Clark returns to Kosovo May 2006:
But when that second justification fell through, we were then told that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks of 9-11. Of course, those very same officials, the Secretaries of State and Defense, soon thereafter announced that neither Saddam nor his government, nor the people of Iraq, had anything to do with the attacks on our nation. We did, after three swings of the rationale bat and three misses, arrive at the reality of a true explanation of why we invaded, conquered and occupied Iraq: we did so to create a democracy in Baghdad and work to spread that form of governance throughout the Middle East.
Never before in the history of this Nation have we invaded a foreign nation to establish a Jeffersonian democracy and never before has our democracy been given such an impossible task on the scale of this grand design. This was, of course, announced many years ago in the now infamous document: Project for a New American Century. The fundamental basis for the success of this strategic effort to create a democratic government in Iraq and watch it spread throughout the Middle East, depends both on the cooperation of the Iraqi people and their government, and on the support and help of the governments of the surrounding countries, all of which or either dictatorships or governments controlled by exceptionally corrupt royal families. The basic underpinnings of this Bush strategy are flawed and cannot be executed so long as the neighboring countries do not desire us to succeed. This is all notwithstanding the reality that most, including even President Bush himself, do not believe that the Iraqi government is in any position to stand on its own two feet. That is why he recently declared that it will be up to another future President to determine a timeline for withdrawal.
We have been brought to a point where I believe history will judge the invasion of Iraq as one of the great strategic blunders of any government.
Nonetheless, as we debate our nation's future with respect to the ongoing military operations in the Middle East, let us never mix our questioning of the President's lack of strategic vision with a wavering of support for the men and women who carry out the mission. While this Administration continues to cut Veterans benefits, raise health care costs for active duty and retired military personnel, and insist on fielding a library of new weapons systems that have little if any relevance in the current fighting - it continues to use our military as a political backdrop.
At West Point, the president announced that we would stay until the "mission was complete". I find this especially vexing since it was he who delayed the home arrival of a returning Aircraft carrier so that he could fly aboard in what was the highest profile public use a of a single U.S. warship since the Japanese signed the instrument of surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri. The only key difference is that in that far ago fateful day the Mission really was accomplished and the leaders who participated in the surrender ceremony actually had achieved the goals that were needed to make the world safe for a generation and protect this nation from a country that really did attack our home soil at Pearl Harbor.
FDR had declared - with no bravado - "mission accomplished." And President Truman rejoiced, not in the use of the ultimate weapons, nuclear weapons, on Japan. Instead the leadership of this nation gave thanks to God that the oceans and skies of the world could return to the business of trade and not the business of war. The efforts and sacrifices of Sergeant Major Lupold and his 200 friends and others like them were what made that peace possible.
We stand now in a nation whose government has been corrupted by lobbyists wielding millions, whose government now fails to recognize the true economic crisis that is hanging over heads - a crisis that is brought to us by deficit spending on a magnitude of incredible proportions and by a failed trade policy that decreases our standard of living and increases our trade imbalance. We stand now in a country whose government's sole fiscal mission is to make millionaires into billionaires and whose government is controlled by the extreme elements of one political party that stifles debate, "Swift Boats" those who criticize and attacks anyone who disagrees with the vision and strategy of the current President.
This week, in fact, a political opponent attacked me on the sole basis that I post my thoughts on DailyKos. (link) This person called into question my credibility because of an opinion Markos may or may not have expressed in the past in this very online community. It is not for me to agree or disagree with Markos, nor to fight for or against him. But instead of debating the merit of my remarks that the Republican Party has been taken over by its own extreme right wing, a remark I stand behind 100 percent (How else can you explain the likes of Pat Robertson who publicly calls for the assassination of the President of Venezuela and tells the American people that God told him that George Bush would win he election?), I am attacked because I debate the issues of the day on DailyKos.
My swift boating attacker failed to mention that I also post on some five or six other blogs and he also failed to mention that I have appeared on the most conservative local radio talk shows and on Fox News Channel. I will go anywhere to debate the issues of the day -- including into the halls and meetings of the most conservative of audiences like the Shooters Committee on Political Education - an exceptionally focused gun owners rights group.
I write here on DailyKos, and in the other netroots arenas, because I know what Sergeant Major Lupold was fighting for. He, like I, many years later, served in uniform to protect our freedom to disagree with our leaders and to offer alternative solutions.
To a community of readers who are fed up with their government being bought by rightwing lobbyists I say, "buy it back". To a community of online readers who are fearful of the erosion of civil liberties I say "elect a government of Representatives who feel like you do." To a community that is tired of government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists, I say, "take it back."
I fear not the swift boat attacks in the middle of the night because I know that the thousands who read these postings will pass them on to other thousands. Sergeant Lupold and hundreds of thousands of others fought in World War Two to give us the right to freely express our dissatisfaction with this government and I will honor them and millions like them by standing by my beliefs and by winning this election so that we can bring a new majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and put a stop to the runaway, misguided Bush agenda.
Sign on and sail with me for I intend to sail in harms way.
Eric Massa