On Dec. 22, USA Today founder and occasional editorialist Al Neuharth wrote a short piece in his paper titled, “They can only dream of holidays at home,” suggesting that American troops serving in Iraq should be brought home.

“‘Support Our Troops’ is a wonderful patriotic slogan,” he wrote. “But the best way to support troops, thrust by unwise commanders in chief into ill-advised adventures like Vietnam and Iraq, is to bring them home. Sooner rather than later. That should be our New Year’s resolution.”

Those who think questioning military policy is always unpatriotic predictably trashed Nueharth’s comments as being irresponsible, offering aid and comfort to the enemy.

And, not surprisingly, there are quite a few Americans who think questioning the military is always unpatriotic.

But his piece did serve one very useful purpose: It opened the door, however slightly, to the possibility that Americans can begin talking about when exactly would be the best time to bring the troops home.

And, if there’s going to be a debate, I want to get in on it immediately. So let me be among the first to jump on the bandwagon.

As of today, right now, this very second, I call for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel from Iraq, and for those troops to be returned home to the United States as soon as possible.

Of course, I think the troops should have never been sent over there in the first place. But since my initial calls to keep the United States from conquering and occupying another country were roundly ignored the first time, I’ll just have to try again.

As if anyone needed to be told, there are compelling reasons for bringing the troops home now.

For starters, about 138,000 U.S. service men and women are in Iraq, and another 20,000 or so serve as support in Kuwait. As Neuharth pointed out, that’s a whole heck of a lot of American citizens who didn’t get to spend the holidays with their families.

Then there’s the number of U.S. troops who have been killed or wounded since the U.S. invasion in March 2003.

According to the Department of Defense, at least 1,340 Americans have been killed in Iraq, with 1,054 of those occurring in combat. The official estimate of those wounded is 10,252.
But the unofficial estimate, made by independent observers in light of the fact that the Defense Department is suspected of minimizing the number of wounded, is as many as 15,000 or 20,000.

Plus, there’s the cost. Although the Bush administration has made it a practice of keeping the bill for military operations out of the official budget, estimates of how much the war has cost so far range around $150 billion, with as much as $300 billion expected to be spent by the end.

According to the National Priorities Project, a non-partisan group that estimates the cost of government spending policies, $150 billion could send more than 19 million children to Head Start programs for one year, build more than 1 million new homes, fully fund every global anti-hunger program for six years or send more than 7 million students to college.

And, if that’s not enough, there’s the complete and utter failure of the war effort to achieve any worthwhile goals beyond removing a brutal dictator who was no realistic threat to the United States.

As I write this, the bodies of 18 young Iraqis, who were taken off a bus and shot dead last month while seeking work at an American military base, were found in a field near the city of Mosul. Earlier in the week, the governor of Baghdad was slain in broad daylight.

Last month, 19 American soldiers and three civilians were killed when a suicide bomber blew up a military mess tent at a base in northern Iraq.

Things have gotten so bad that the Iraqi government, with what little authority it holds, has extended a state of emergency until after the elections, scheduled for Jan. 30.

That doesn’t sound like success to me.

But if all that’s not enough—and for too many Americans, it won’t be—then I offer one more compelling reason to bring the troops home now: the number of Iraqi dead.

According to www.iraqbodycount.net, an independent collector of information about civilian war casualties in the country, at least 15,000 and as many as 17,000 people have died inside Iraq. It is a number that is hard to verify since the U.S. military has categorically ruled out reporting the number of civilians it killed, for any reason.

Other observers who have conducted their own studies, however, have come up with much higher numbers. The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, last year released a study which put the number as high as 100,000.

That’s anywhere from three to 33 times the number of people who died in New York and Washington, D.C., on 9/11.

If we invaded Iraq as revenge for what happened that day, then I say we’ve achieved our goal. If we invaded for something else, then I say enough damage has been done and it’s time to call it quits.

Al was right. Bring the troops home.

And soon, before we kill another 10,000 or so innocent human beings.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2005 at 10:33 am and is filed under On Writing.