Lance Cpl. Holly Charette, a 21-year-old from Cranston, R.I., finds one of her own letters as she sorts through Headquarters Battalion Marines' mail, March 17. Charette recently deployed here from her home base at Camp Lejeune, N.C. to serve in Operation Iraqi Freedom. (U.S. Marine Corps. photo by Sgt. Stephen D'Alessio)
Rhode Island, as everyone knows, is a small state. With 1,048,319 people living on a land area of 1,045 square miles, we only need one newspaper, the Providence Journal, to cover our local needs, generally speaking of course. Today’s front page featured this story:
A 2001 graduate of Cranston High School East was among the six U.S. military personnel killed in Fallujah on Thursday. Lance Cpl. Holly A. Charette, 21, a mail carrier for her division, was killed by a suicide bomber who drove a car into the convoy in which she was traveling, the Department of Defense said last night. Charette's family could not be reached. Charette delivered mail for the 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C. She had one year left in her enlistment, and planned to apply for a job with the U.S. Postal Service afterward, she said in a May 3 Marine Corps news release. "I never really thought too hard about being a mail person, but it's really an important job, and people depend on me," she said in the release. 
Holly A. Charette was among 4 women killed and 11 wounded in a suicide car-bomb attack that military officials say may have specifically targeted female service members. Charette's death brings the total of Rhode Island combat deaths since Sept. 11, 2001, to 13. Of those, Charette is the first female Rhode Islander killed in the war. (Sharon T. Swartworth, a Judge Advocate General's Corps Officer originally from Warwick but living in Virginia was killed in Iraq in 2003.) In high school, Charette played on the field hockey team and was a cheerleader for the ice hockey team. Her yearbook shows her in her cheerleading uniform and in street clothes, arms around girlfriends, beaming in each photo. The quote she chose reads, "Don't say 'goodbye' because it's the end. Say 'nice knowing you,' because it was." (BY ELIZABETH GUDRAISJournal Staff Writer)
I sit at this keyboard daily writing about politics and ranting against this war, usually engaged in polemical outrage at the Bush Administration’s moral and ethical turpitude. The daily rhetoric of our politicians usually supplies ample fodder for a diurnal, finger-waving diatribe. I have no delusions regarding the efficacy of this minor blog to change anything other than my own choice of words. Nevertheless, I continue.
War is defined by death. It is a construct of politicians, promulgated by lies and subterfuge. As the famous Prussian militarist and author of Vom Kriege (On War), Carl von Clausewitz wrote,
"It is of course well known that the only source of war is politics -- the intercourse of governments and peoples. . . . We maintain . . . that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means."
Death and disfiguration of the body and spirit, however, are the only lasting effects of this “continuation of political intercourse”, as politics become corrupted and change like fashion and empires rise and fall; death is final and eternal. Bush’s invasion of and consequent war in Iraq, forged out of a policy of hegemony and propagated with prevarication, did not meet the definition of jus ad bellum and is thusly an illegal act. In the language of the Nuremberg prosecutors, aggressive leaders who launch unjust wars commit "crimes against peace." Bush’s neo-con advisors have set a policy, justified by the still uninvestigated crimes of 9/11, that is intent on perpetuating a state of global war exemplified by Clausewitz’s statement,
"If war is part of policy, policy will determine its character. As policy becomes more ambitious and vigorous, so will war, and this may reach the point where war attains its absolute form. . . . Policy is the guiding intelligence and war only the instrument, not vice versa."
At the beginning of this war, the ultra-hyped “shock and awe” part, the population was again, as in the Gulf War, whipped into a frenzy of blood lust, even though the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said portentously at the time,
"We need to condition people that this is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be. People are going to die."
Not everyone saw the war as a jus ad bellum. War protesters staged events and rallies while intellectuals and writers spoke against the purported justifications for invading Iraq. The author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges said at the time,
I think the {Iraq} war is illegitimate not because civilians will die. Civilians die in every conflict. It's illegitimate because the administration has not, to my mind, provided any evidence of any credible threat. And we can't go to war just because we think somebody might do something eventually. There has to be hard intelligence. There has to be a real threat if we're going to ask our young men and women to die. Because once you unleash the "dogs of war" and I know this from every war I've ever covered, war has a force of its own. It's not surgical. We talk about taking out Saddam Hussein. Once you use the blunt instrument of war, it has all sorts of consequences when you use violence on that scale that you can't anticipate. I'm not opposed to the use of force. But force is always has to be a last resort because those who wield force become tainted or contaminated by it. And one of the things that most frightens me about the moment our nation is in now, is that we've lost touch with the notion of what war is.
Along these lines, the poet W.S. Merwin wrote:
It would not have been possible for me ever to trust someone who acquired office by the shameful means Mr. Bush and his abettors resorted to in the last presidential election. His nonentity was rapidly becoming more apparent than ever when the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001, provided him and his handlers with a role for him, that of "wartime leader", which they, and he in turn, were quick to exploit. This role was used at once to silence all criticism of the man and his words as unpatriotic, and to provide the auspices for a sustained assault upon civil liberties, environmental protections, and general welfare. The perpetuation of this role of "wartime leader" is the primary reason-- more important even than the greed for oil fields and the wish to blot out his father's failure-- for the present determination to visit war upon Iraq, kill and maim countless people, and antagonize much of the world of which Mr. Bush had not heard until recently. The real iniquities of Saddam Hussein should be recognized, in this context, as the pretexts they are. His earlier atrocities went unmentioned as long as he was an ally of former Republican administrations, which were happy, in their time, to supply him with weapons. I think that someone who was maneuvered into office against the will of the electorate, as Mr. Bush was, should be allowed to make no governmental decisions (including judicial appointments) that might outlast his questionable term, and if the reasons for war were many times greater than they have been said to be I would oppose any thing of the kind under such "leadership". To arrange a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein.
And yet, the Bush administration pounded the drums of war incessantly, before the country and before the world at the United Nations. Nevertheless, the case was made, as the Downing Street Memos show, with flawed and manipulated intelligence that was “being fixed around the policy”. There would be no stopping this initiative, and we were left with the result that, as Hedges put it,
Our whole civil society is being torn apart. Once again, as is true in every war, the media parrots back the clichés and jingoes of the state. Imbibes and promotes the myth. In wartime, the press is always part of the problem. And that we are about to engage in that ecstatic, exciting, narcotic that is war. And that if we don't get a grasp on the poison that war is, then that poison can ultimately kill us just as surely as the disease.
Politically, Iraq is so disjunctive that it is like a glass-ball world full of sworn enemies that has been shaken, and every individual has to look at those around him/her as that soul’s potential murderer. To read the daily news reports of death and destruction is to immerse oneself in incomprehensible pathos. There is no sense, no hope, no logic; only war profiteering, whatever delusions of grandeur the Bush cabal suffer from, and the immutable loss of life. Whatever hatred fuels the insurgency in Iraq, it is matched by the hubris, greed, and imperial ambitions of our own corrupt leaders. They are cowards who send children off to die for their delusional designs. Bush and Rumsfeld, et al, have even failed to protect the troops who risk their lives daily in this dystopian hell. They have blundered into a war of which they have lost control, of which is already lost.
Here is the Secretary of Defense in Iraq:
David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images During a visit to Iraq last year, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld rode in a Rhino Runner, a steel-reinforced vehicle that its maker says is designed to withstand 7.62 x 39-millimeter and 5.56-millimeter ammunition, overhead airbursts and explosive devices up to 1,000 pounds.
In War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,
Chris Hedges argues that war is both a deadly addiction—a drug that offers an unmatchable intoxication, the thrill of being released from the moral strictures of everyday life—and a unifying force that provides a sense of meaning, purpose, and self-sacrifice that can wash away life’s trivial concerns. But the meaningfulness of combat, Hedges suggests, depends upon the myth of war. In reality, no matter what grand cause it is supposed to support, war is simply the basest form of aggression: “organized murder.” Once war begins, the moral universe collapses and every manner of atrocity can be justified in the eyes of those who wage it, because the cause is just, the enemy is inhuman, and only war can restore balance to the world. Hedges reveals the hollowness of such thinking and makes an impassioned plea for humility, love, and compassion as the human race’s only hope for survival. Only when a nation can accept its share of blame and see its enemy with compassion rather than hatred can war be averted and true peace prevail.
Later today, Donald Rumsfeld will appear on the Sunday talk show, Meet the Press. We can only hope that the obsequious Russert will ask him if he’s spoken to the parents of Holly Charette, and told them how grateful he is that she gave her life for…
War is defined by death. It is a descent into madness, into the “heart of darkness”. And as Neruda pleads in his last stanza of I'm Explaining a Few Things,
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood In the streets!
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