A few months ago, just after midnight on Jan. 1, the Iraq war finally concluded. For the first time in two decades, Iraq is officially free of U.S. involvement. We arrived in 1991 in a New Year’s Eve-like show of fatal fireworks, and the last American soldier exited in time for Christmas.

When the war started our daughter was in diapers. She finishes college in a few months. However it translates in Arabic, my guess is the Iraqis sighed a collective “good riddance.”

Ironically, the hour that war ended I was in an Air Force C-17 cargo plane, winging my way south from the gorgeous island nation of New Zealand to the inhabitable continent of Antarctica — about a five-hour flight. I went as a chaplain providing spiritual support to the military and scientific community that lives and works on that desperately remote land mass.

As I sat in that cavernous cargo plane, stuffed full of pallets and people and far too noisy for conversation, my travel-fractured brain drifted to the last time I flew in a C-17; it was in 2006 when I was leaving Iraq.

This time my fellow passengers were tired, but not anxious or fearful. In the place of rifles and Kevlar, passengers there had laptops and extreme weather gear. Rather than security briefings, there were routine safety briefings and no need for vomit-inducing corkscrew landings. In both distance and spirit, it was worlds apart from Iraq.

As I sat, my mind flashed to a dozen military faces — the soldier who like clockwork would arrive about two minutes late to my worship service, and in sitcom-like fashion would nosily stumble to his seat, clanging his rifle against the concrete floor and metal chairs. He would then sit and stare at me with penetrating blue eyes, transfixed as I spoke, listening as though my words were the spiritual water that would somehow prop him up for one more week of heat and hell.

I think of the face of a sedated soldier as I held his leg steady while a doctor cleaned and dressed the wound. I remember a legless Marine who wanted to know if his two boys would still love a father with no legs. Then there was the wailing Iraqi boy of 14 with a bandage around his head, a victim of a suicide bomber, who had just moments before received the news that his blindness would be permanent. I wanted to weep for the evil that humans are capable of.

I remember ducking into what I thought was a Baghdad jewelry store, looking for some unique jewelry for my daughter and realizing it was our equivalent of a pawn shop where families had sold their treasured heirlooms to survive. The shopkeeper begged me to buy something, offering a steep discount. I paid full price.

There were funny stories also, but they were mostly the kind where you had to be there.

In some ways Antarctica was similar to Iraq — both are dry deserts and isolated from the comforts of home. But in one outstanding fashion it was different, for the multinational scientific force deployed there is seeking peaceful answers that will help, not harm, humanity.

Today when asked about my thoughts on the Iraqi war, my stock answer is this: Quality historians will need about 50 years to gain adequate perspective to accurately assess it. We are far too close to draw accurate conclusions. But what I do believe is that in the meantime we need to seek to fund the Veterans Administration on a long-term basis because there are boatloads of wounded, mostly young veterans who will need care for many decades to come.

However, since talking to my friend I have learned that battle makes you a prisoner. A prisoner of your own psyche, and the scars you gain never really go away. He said that stuff gave him nightmares. Not long ago, I wrote that war games desensitize people to violence. That is why many soldiers of my generation are gunge ho about going to war….@ 1st.

As a real life veteran, my friend told me that I was right. He told me one story that was so heartbreaking I was @ a loss for words. He ended up having to shoot a young man who was carrying (I believe it was c-4 explosives) and that experience was one of the most excruciating things he’s ever done.

Anyone who GLORIFIES war has never been in one, or is cold blooded to the deepest reaches of their soul.

From what I have heard, a war torn nation sounds like hell on earth.

Inspired by St. Louis, which hosted a parade to honor Iraq War veterans last month, a Welcome Home Our Military Parade is being planned in Richmond on May 19.

Craig Schneider, a key organizer of the Missouri parade, is working with six other communities through The Welcome Home Foundation to plan celebrations recognizing returning veterans.

Schneider was in Virginia this week helping plan the Richmond event, participating in a meeting with the governor’s staff at the Virginia War Memorial, and the city has pledged support for the parade, said Robin Beres, who is chairing the event.

“I am very supportive of the grass-roots effort that has brought this parade request to Virginia’s Capital City,” Mayor Dwight C. Jones said in a statement. “I’ve discussed this with City Council, and we look forward to working with the parade organizers in developing an event that honors those men and women who have served our country through military service in both Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The parade is tentatively scheduled for 10 a.m. on May 19 — Armed Forces Day — and will travel the Boulevard from The Diamond to the Carillon in Byrd Park.

Beres, the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s editorial office manager and a retired Navy chief petty officer, proposed the parade in an opinion piece in the paper. She said she sees veterans returning home, without fanfare, after serving three or four tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. “Nobody really bothered to do anything” to recognize them, she said.

The parade already has its own logo and Facebook page, and a team of core volunteers are in place, among them members of the Navy League Richmond Council, Beres said.

Michael Wallace, a Richmond spokesman, said planning for the event is still under way but that city support could include services from the police, fire and public works departments, as well as the waiver of permit fees.

Schneider said people in 22 communities have reached out to him inquiring about holding parades. Two are scheduled to be held before Richmond’s.

The idea for the St. Louis parade sprang from a December conversation between Schneider and a friend, and they pulled the event together in a month. It was the nation’s first big welcome home for veterans of the war since U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq in December.

Schneider said he is flying around the country helping other localities put together parades because he found his involvement in the St. Louis event so meaningful. “I really believed in it,” said Schneider, who is the father of a veteran.

Tens of thousands attended the St. Louis parade, which featured 88 military groups and entertainers from around the country. He said the event cost about $35,000.

Katie Schneider interviews anti-racist activist (Photo credit: thivierr)

Katie Schneider interviews Lindsay Ross (Photo credit: thivierr)

Last week the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a half-page letter entitled “No Need To Panic About Global Warming” above the center fold of its Opinion page. The letter was signed by 16 prominent scientists and claimed, among other things, “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.” Such a stark assertion would be devastating to the consensus on climate change if it were true. But it is not true. Data published by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) show that global warming is real and well-documented:

This year tied 1997 as the 11th warmest year since records began in 1880…This marks the 35th consecutive year, since 1976, that the yearly global temperature was above average. The warmest years on record were 2010 and 2005, which were 0.64°C (1.15°F) above average.

While the NOAA report used selected official data sets, the well-known global warming skeptic Richard Muller initiated the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project to re-examine all available data from around the world. The analysis changed his mind. On October 21, 2011, he summarized his conclusions about the reality of climate change, also in the WSJ, in an article entitled “The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism“:

We discovered that about one-third of the world’s temperature stations have recorded cooling temperatures, and about two-thirds have recorded warming. The two-to-one ratio reflects global warming. The changes at the locations that showed warming were typically between 1-2ºC, much greater than the [official] average of 0.64ºC.

The press needs to be open to all streams of opinion. But we learned from the Iraq War, which was based on faulty arguments about weapons of mass destruction, how important it is for the press to note and contradict statements that are demonstrably false. Is it too much to expect the WSJ to have referred to its own October 21st article? A simple note at the end could have alerted its readers to the questionable nature of the statements in the opinion piece it just published so prominently. Instead, the WSJ appeared to endorse the misleading arguments in the “anti-panic” letter by that very prominence. Is some unhealthy editorial agenda at work here? The future of climate change reporting in the WSJ should allow us to answer that question.

Interesting movie about what happens when young kids working at the Statue of Liberty lose their job in the wake of attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.  If you ever watched A Walk To Remember (2002), you will immediately recognize Al Thompson, the token Black character from that film.

Well times have changed since that film, and Al Thompson has served as a casting director and a producer since that time.  In this film, he plays a young man struggling to get through trying circumstances, pursued by recruiters for the Army that eventually catch up with him deferring his ambitions to go to college and make something out of himself.  The war changes him, and he is not the same man coming out as he was going in, as he deals with mental issues.

The film portrays recruiters in an extremely negative light, manipulating the emotions of young kids that are caught in difficult situations, even lying about the fact that they may have to go to war in Iraq.  While that might be true, the film seems to have an anti-war, anti-military bias.  It is characteristic of films shot in the the last decade, anti-establishment, questionably unpatriotic, but it does give you a lot to think about.

The killings in Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005, is considered one of the war’s defining moments, further tainting America’s reputation when it was already at a low point after the release of photos of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.

The case continues to fuel anger in Iraq because not one of the eight Marines initially charged has been convicted — a main reason behind the country’s demands that US troops be subject to its laws if its forces remained there after the war ended in December. 

Image via Wikipedia

Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr

I’m not going to bore anyone, trying to analyze what happened during the past nine years, nor will make any attempt to calculate the final balance. History and generations after us will have the hard task to assess all the pros and cons of this war. My thoughts are flying in a completely different direction. I’m thinking, if this war was wrong, why did so many Iraqi civilians and American (and British, and from many other countries) soldiers have to die? Was it in vain?

The primary excuse the Pentagon used to justify the initial attacks was the tip that Iraq was allegedly in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). As it turned out later in 2003, there were no WMD’s in Iraq. But the invasion did not stop. A second excuse came in and it was Saddam and his atrocities. One much more reasonable motive, so the war kept on. Thousands of mothers, sisters, daughters and wives continued packing the bags of their sons, brothers, fathers and husbands, sending them to fight a war that it wasn’t theirs.

I have always liked men in uniforms. But that’s it. Before Iraq I only enjoyed soldiers in movies, TV shows and documentaries. I have never actually thought how a mother or a wife of a soldier would feel. Ironing and folding the uniform, polishing his medals and stripes, putting some family photos between the leather belt and the camouflage pants, while the inevitable questions circle like a vortex in her mind: Is he going to be OK? Will he come back in one piece, or some child strapped to a bomb will blow up his base? Will he return in a metal coffin with the national flag wrapped around it?

Questions without answers. Questions, with which such brave women have to live every single day… Questions that dictate the course of their life, turning it into a constant nightmare. Facing the real evil every day.

This is business. War is business. A business where the basic merchandise are life and death, demanded and supplied through the currency of bravery, courage and patriotism, not only on the side of the soldier, but also on behalf of their women.

To me such women are among the strongest, along with the single mothers taking care of sick and disabled children. I admire these brave women. I may love men in uniforms, but I can’t put myself to walk in these women’s shoes even for a second. I’m not that brave at all.

So, this is a trubute to all the women around the world, who had been brave enough to give away their dearest and to live through the whole nightmare of war in the name of the sacrifice, love, freedom and life. This is also a trubute to the women and men on the other side – in Iraq, who also gave thousands of lives as collateral damage to a war that they, as civilians, had nothing to do with. Because war hurts for everyone:

The flag that they lowered was the flag of the white flag of the United States Forces-Iraq.  The flag was then folded and properly placed in a camoflauge sheath by top commander of the U.S. Army, Lloyd Austin.  Lloyd Austin talks about how the war “tested our military’s strength and our ability to adapt and evolve.” 

President Obama recently met with the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and he feels that the Iraqi government is capable of maintaining its’ current soveriegnty.  After the end of the Iraq War, President Obama made a speech to several of the troops in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. 

“For nearly nine years our nation has been at war in Iraq.  And you the incredible men and women of Fort Bragg, have been there every step of the way, serving with honor, sacrificing greatly, from the first waves of the invasion to some of the last troops to come home.  So, as your commander-in-chief and on behalf of a grateful nation, I’m proud to finally say these two words, and I know your families agree: Welcome home! Welcome home. Welcome home. Welcome home.” said the President.

Of the one million U.S. Soldiers that had been to Iraq, a mere 4,500 had died, and 30,000 had been wounded.  Although these casualties were an atrocity to our country, not one of these men died in vain.  The lives lost and bloodshed were, although not wanted, necessary to restore Peace in the country of Iraq.  Many more Iraqi’s died, soldiers and civilians. 

Currently, there are about 4,000 U.S. Soldiers in Iraq.  They are waiting to go home to see their families and loved ones for the holidays.  All are bound to return by December 31 of this year.  It is important to remember how fortunate we are to have our troops home, especially in time for the Holidays.  The return of the troops will be the biggest Christmas present for many Americans this year.

Today America lowered their flag in Iraq signalling the end of bloody useless 9 year war that killed 1,000’s of innocent people in Iraq on top of the soldiers and insurgents lost on both sides. It’s no secret we entered this war under false pretenses, now we leave when they say things have been cleaned up despite reports of corruption in the police forces over there, as well as reports that the police force is built by normal everyday people who still fear terrorist groups such as the Taliban who have a strong influence in the area and could try to take power away from an American led government and a demorcacy on shaky ground. Yet more still is going on today.

Congress is trying to pass legislation in a hurry preventing a governmental shutdown which could result in a lot of chaos with people already pointing fingers to a goverment largely ignoring the populace. How can a country built by the people for the people pass laws that hold back, detain, and declare our citizens criminals for debating with our government’s views and pushing for peace. The shutdown stems from a budget crisis that has essentially drained social securtiy, medicare, and all income taxes strictly to fund services the country provides us with. IF this continues to the point where we do experience a shutdown many federal employees will be furloughed excluding the military but they may experience delayed paydates, or even pay cuts. Something I find disgusting is the fact that members of congress still recieve their pay either way, even if they are the people forcing a shut down of our government. However I am begining to wonder if a shutdown would be the last straw the population needs to see our government is a joke. Soon we may see our military forces in our own street protecting our government’s laws due to the shutdown and lack or direction our emergency services could have in this event.

The majority of America’s 41,Thousand soldiers currently have went back property, as well as the last 8-10,Thousand troops who’re nevertheless in the country will follow suit inside the coming days.

Image by The U.S. Army via Flickr

However “this is not a divorce,Inches General Martin Dempsey told lawmakers upon Capitol Slope, in accordance with NPR. The You.Azines. will hold a small contingent within Iraq to guard the actual U . s . embassy, as well as the management can be planning to keep a number of teachers in the country. Assistant involving Safeguard Panetta stated negotiations in that issue will continue. Approximately Some,Thousand to five,1000 exclusive stability building contractors may also be expected to continue to be.

The particular National withdrawal ended up being section of any ‘08 offer discussed relating to the Tree management and the Iraqi govt, plus an important marketing campaign promise pertaining to Barak. Yet the supervision offers long engaged in negotiations to help keep a more substantial number of soldiers, in spite of the 08 package. Individuals negotiations on terms failed while Iraqi congress declined to offer the particular soldiers defenses.

Exactly what do 10 years of battle in Iraq seem like in stats? Based on Linked Press figures, Some,475 People in america have left since November 30. Forty five,Three hundred and fifty Us citizens ended up wounded, and a minimum of 103,775 Iraqis have lost his or her lives.