Ex-Marine Infantry Squad Leader Paul Szoldra’s Short, Eloquent Summation of the Moral and Strategic Futility of the Iraq War Cannot Be Bested — a Comment Expanding His, Tell Me Again, Why Did My Friends Die In Iraq?

© 2014 Peter Free

 

04 January 2014

 

 

Citation

 

Paul Szoldra, Tell Me Again, Why Did My Friends Die In Iraq?, Business Insider (03 January 2014)

 

 

Americans have conveniently forgotten about the Iraq War — which means we are almost certainly not going to learn from our mistakes there

 

Ex-Marine infantry squad leader, Paul Szoldra, yesterday reflected that his friend Lance Corporal Franklin Sweger died in the Battle of Fallujah in 2004.  Which reminded him that he is still wondering which national interest and/or geopolitical strategy justified the loss of 4,488 troops during the Iraq War:

 

 

The proof of how pointless the entire endeavour . . . came Friday morning, with a report from Liz Sly in the Washington Post.

 

"At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah," a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety told Sly.

 

“The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.”

 

Fallujah has fallen, and the same scenario is about to happen in the even-larger city of Ramadi.

 

[In] his "Last Letter" written Mar. 18, 2013, Tomas Young, a veteran of Iraq who was shot and paralyzed just five days into his deployment, predicted this moment:

 

"The Iraq War is the largest strategic blunder in U.S. history," he wrote.

 

"It obliterated the balance of power in the Middle East. It installed a corrupt and brutal pro-Iranian government in Baghdad, one cemented in power through the use of torture, death squads and terror. And it has left Iran as the dominant force in the region. On every level—moral, strategic, military and economic—Iraq was a failure."

 

© 2013 Paul Szoldra, Tell Me Again, Why Did My Friends Die In Iraq?, Business Insider (03 January 2014) (paragraphs split, partially reformatted)

 

 

Szoldra concludes that what his friends died for was not quite enough, from a moral and geopolitical perspective

 

He wrote:

 

 

I'll never know why they died. It wasn't to stop the "mushroom cloud" or to defend the nation after 9/11. It sure wasn't for freedom, democracy, apple pie, or mom and dad back home.

 

The only reason they died was for the man or woman beside them. They died for their friends.

 

I'm just not satisfied with that.

 

© 2013 Paul Szoldra, Tell Me Again, Why Did My Friends Die In Iraq?, Business Insider (03 January 2014)

 

Amen.

 

 

Ethical clarification

 

From the perspective of duty, honor, courage and personal worth, dying for one’s friends is enough.  None of these troops died in vain, at least so regarding the ethical pantheon that governs our individual behavior.

 

But — from the perspective of a just society and an ethical nation, it is not enough.  Draining blood and the possibility of happy futures from our sacrificial volunteer military, for no persuasive national reason, is parasitism at its worst.

 

That is what ex-Marine squad leader Paul Szoldra is ultimately driving at.

 

 

On 06 January, Air Force Captain David Lyon’s body comes home to Peterson Air Force Base from Afghanistan . . .

 

Afghanistan, another of America’s apparently unending string of misbegotten and self-destructive wars.

 

We, who live and work at Peterson, will all be out there, along the street, to salute. Making that final, sad gesture of camaraderie and respect, as the cortege moves slowly toward the Air Force Academy, where Academy graduate Captain Lyon is to be buried.

 

Captain Lyon is yet another of the military's fallen, in this much too long, idiotically undertaken and managed Military Industrial Complex-motivated war in Afghanistan.

 

This is deadly parasitism, indulged so that the plutocratically greedy can profit from our nationally self-destructive adventures abroad.

 

 

The moral? — America’s penchant for avoiding insightful self-reflection continues to kill and maim those who seek to serve the nation with honor

 

Our arguably best and most courageous One Percent is continually chewed up by a complacently avaricious, often cowardly national culture.

 

With Paul Szoldra, I am “just not satisfied with that.”