War reflection: With the Marines in Iraq
Washington Times | April 21 2003 | Richard Tomkins
For 36 days this correspondent was in a unique position to gauge that sentiment. As part of Pentagon policy for media coverage of the war, I was embedded with Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, or simply Bravo 1/5.
Bravo 1/5 was one of the first two units to cross into Iraq from Kuwait at the start of the land war (we would have been first, but Alpha Company broke the line of march and moved ahead of us). Bravo 1/5 captured a gas and oil separation plant in the al Ramallah oil fields in southern Iraq, routed Iraqi defenders while capturing a key bridge over the Saddam Hussein Canal in central Iraq, liberated village after village and a children's prison, fought its way into Baghdad through a gauntlet of RPG fire, and seized and held Saddam's 17-acre complex on the Tigris River despite a five-hour onslaught from Baath Party gunmen and foreign extremists. It was one of the heaviest battles of the Iraq conflict, with the besieged Marines nearly running out of ammunition.
For those who oppose the war, let there be no mistake: the Ba’ath regime was the Nazi Party of the second half of the 20th century. Saddam Hussein’s brutal dictatorship raped, tortured, murdered, extorted, and terrorized the Iraqis for 35 years. Mass graves bear testimony to countless crimes. One U.S. Marine battalion liberated a prison populated entirely by children, where the jailers had brutalized the weakest of them and killed the strongest.
You actually dont' know that. You may be right, but not by knowledge. But this is irrelevant to the question. The fact is that George Bush and American troops are not the ones responsible for terrorism. Only is a distorted unthinking kind of world would someone say what you have said.
Right. Which is not what you said above.
Right, and this contradicts what you said above. The members of Congress are our representatives. They do not vote in our place; they vote for themselves. If you don't like how someone votes, vote against them. But that doesn't mean he will be defeated, and if he is, it doesn't mean the next guy will vote your way.
We live in a republic, which means that Ken doesn't make the choices for America, thankfully.
The pictures of those poor children really disturbed me last night and I still think about it today.
They are orphans.
They have no one.
I would adopt one or two of them on the spot if it were possible.
:tear:
I have a tendency to be somewhat skeptical also since learning that the U.S Millitary paid to have stories printed in Iraqi newspapers.
But wheter the story is true or not, there was probably a lot of abuse going on before the war and certainly because of the effects of the war it may have grown much deeper. These children are victims just as much as the thousands of other Iraqis are victims which some would just write off as being casulties of war. We have more than just a few children to grieve about. KenH is right to bring to attention the effect of our going into Iraq and it's negative impact. Sooner or later we have to learn from our mistakes so incidents like these don't get repeated.
Yeah, every bad regime that the U.S. government doesn't like nowadays is compared to the Nazis and Hitler.
However, unlike Nazi Germany Iraq had not declared war on these United States nor posed a threat to these United States - unless one considers stopping the selling of Iraqi oil in Euros instead of U.S. dollars to be worth all of the carnage that has taken place and will continue to take place for no telling how long in Iraq.