War Criminals and Heroes

Looking back at it, it was a time when George Orwell took charge of the script, and we all reacted accordingly.

No one I knew thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No one I knew favored bombing the hell out of Iraq, or believed that we could do it, put a government in place, and then leave. No one I knew thought this was about anything more than oil, or possibly saving the US dollar (a report in Vanity Fair suggested that Hussein might change oil payments from dollars to the Euro, striking a crippling blow to the US currency).

Unfortunately, what we knew made no difference. Because in the months following the September 11^th attacks, a half-witted American president was cajoled / coerced / convinced to engage in a war with Iraq that was and is illegal and immoral.

And the people who did speak up against it?

Well, one was Phil Donahue, who had the highest ratings for a talk show at the time. But an internal memo from his network, MSNBC, revealed that he was fired for opposing George W. Bush—not, as the network stated, for poor ratings.

Well, we know the rest of the story. Or rather, we don’t. It’s certainly true that there were no WMDs, and we’ve learned that taking a nation from dictatorship to anarchy doesn’t do much good. We’ve also seen that putting a generation of American soldiers through the agony of war tears lives and families apart.

We haven’t seen much of what it’s done to Iraqi families, and statistics vary—is it hundreds of thousands dead, or more than a million? Nor have we seen the campus riots that we did in the Vietnam War—we have outsourced the army to our poor, and who cares about them?

In a picture that is unimaginably cynical enters one man, Tomas Young, who believes, who trusts, who takes what he sees at face value. He believes George W. Bush, and enlists two days after the September 11^th attacks. He prepares to deploy to Afghanistan.

Instead, he is sent to Iraq.

And five days later, is shot by a sniper. He’s paralyzed from the nipples down, and will never walk again.

And things go badly for him—a pulmonary embolism leaves him slurring his words, he cannot feed himself, he suffers excruciating pain in his abdomen and has to have a colostomy. Oh, and his only food is liquid nutrition, which he receives by feeding tube.

He doesn’t, however, stop speaking out. And Tomas Young spoke out last week on the tenth anniversary of the War in Iraq. He said what should be said—that Bush and Blair were and are war criminals. He also announced that he’s had enough; he will stop taking any nourishment or fluids, and fast until the end.

Young is 33 years old.

Readers of Iguanas will know: my mother made the same decision as Young. He is, however, half a century younger than she was when she decided to die.

Which made it difficult—how to get the hospice care needed to support him through this process? Ironically, it was through the same term, “failure to thrive,” that ended up on my mother’s death certificate.

I completely get Young’s decision to die. And he’s not alone in thinking that justice has not been done in the case of two leaders who violated the 1945 UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So says Michael Mansfield, a British lawyer who led the Legal Action Against War protest in 2003. Mansfield points out that the charter specifically forbids a preemptive strike on the basis of a perceived threat. Yet that’s what Blair and Bush did by manipulating flawed data.

And we, of course, let them get away with it. So now we have a new generation of vets suffering from brain disorders and shell shock. We have lives that are so much ruined that death becomes the only acceptable way out. And we have the moral responsibility to demand that the ICC—the International Criminal Court—try Bush and Blair for war crimes.

Oh, and Bush? What’s he up to, nowadays, as Tomas Young prepares to end a decade of suffering?

All of Washington is talking about it—he’s taken up painting.

Can’t tell—is it one step up or down from Ecce Mono?