By Paul Street

To: All Active-Duty United States Military Personnel
 
From: A Concerned U.S. Citizen
 
       
WE HAVE FAILED YOU
 
The ongoing United States invasion of Iraq has cost the lives of more than 4,000   American soldiers and 1.2 million Iraqis. The Democratic-majority U.S. Senate has just (20 minutes ago as I write this essay on the afternoon of May 22, 2008) passed $165 billion "to fund the war in Iraq until President Bush's successor takes over."  Congress will provide another seven month's funding to sustain the bloody, miserable, and prolonged occupation of Mesopotamia.

 
With money provided by Democratic and Republican legislators, the Pentagon is building a gigantic hyper-militarized Baghdad embassy that will be the largest "diplomatic" outpost in world history.  It will employ 1,000 U.S. U.S. government personnel, including hundreds of CIA operatives.
 

Meanwhile the U.S. maintains a number of huge military bases across Iraq, all permanent by design.
 

None of the remaining corporate-sponsored presidential candidates - John McCain, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton - is going to end the occupation between now and the next election cycle. Beneath the Democratic Party's rhetoric of withdrawal, a president Obama or Clinton and a Democratic Congress could be expected to maintain a high level of U.S. presence in Iraq indefinitely - unless forced to do otherwise by an aroused citizenry.
 

There is no functional citizens' antiwar movement currently capable of forcing "homeland" political authorities to break from the status quo of enduring occupation.
 

A majority of Americans have long supported a rapid withdrawal from Iraq but are unwilling and/or unable to do anything serious to bring it about.  For various reasons relating to the poverty of America's ever-more dangerously post-democratic political culture, there is no relief coming for troops from the civilian side. This is a nation where citizens are politically divided, distracted, uninterested, and submissive, and where "elites" are happy to keep them that way.
 

The Washington war planners enjoy lives of luxury and opulence.  So do the leading owners and managers of America's so-called "defense" companies, who have made a profit-killing off all the human killing in Iraq.
 

Meanwhile, untold thousands of U.S. soldiers struggle with lives altered by injuries received in the execution of illegitimate orders. Despite majority public antiwar opinion at home and abroad, hundreds and perhaps thousands more U.S troops are slated to die and receive terrible injuries in Iraq in coming months and years. 

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