GWOT = WWII?

Bush has been telling us recently that the war in Iraq is just like World War II. Here's what one WWII veteran has to say about today's world in this Week's Martha's Vineyard Times:

To the Editor:

I didn't see the fireworks last week, but I heard the rumble, and the bang, the occasionally sharp report that took me back to Italy 63 years ago where it was winter and the fighting was heavy. It was cold, wet and bloody awful in every sense of the word.

Perhaps we didn't think about it at the time, but what kept us going, hindsight tells me clearly, was the fact that we knew what we were fighting for and were convinced of the rightness if not necessarily the righteousness of our cause. We thought we knew our enemies and what we thought we knew was pretty terrible. What we found out later was that they were even worse, far more deserving to be loathed and destroyed than any of us could have ever conceived.

But I have recollections far more worthy of recording than those of battle, for I have recollections of the joyous welcome we received as the Allied forces moved north and closer to the heartland of the Third Reich. All the Allies were welcomed by the degraded, homeless and starving civilians of every nationality, but it was the Americans above all who seemed to be recognized as saviors from a paradise far away. A paradise not of shiny cars and beautiful dancers and romantic cowboys but a paradise where equality, justice and freedom of religion were not just words but the law. America at the time was the epitome of what the rest of the world wanted. Power, mighty military power yes, but power contrived, controlled and disbursed by men of honor and credibility.

After the concentration camps and the other horrors that we found later and after the bomb and the worldwide defeat of tyranny, the United Nations was born largely at the urging of our country in the hope of preventing another holocaust

Today, our hopes of 60 years ago are shattered, and our beautiful country is no longer loved and respected but hated and denounced in many languages and in many countries and their capitals. We have done deeds in a war which we started which would have been undreamed of even in the nightmare of World War II. Our president today will not allow his staff even to talk directly to their opposite numbers who are the elected or appointed heads of our so-called enemies.

How can two groups at war with each other ever hope to achieve a solution to any problem without a face to face confrontation and consultation? Our soldiers do not know who is or are the enemy. He who is an ally in one instant can become a deadly opponent the next. People say, "Bring the troops home now!" Fine, but Iraq is in a civil war - a civil war which is the direct result of our inexcusable military meddling. Yes, Saddam Hussein was a terrible person, but have we not been responsible for almost 1,700 American casualties and numbers of Iraqi deaths in the tens of thousands?

What is the answer? I wish above all that I knew, but this big charade must be stopped before it engulfs the entire world, an all-too-real probability. Somehow we must climb down the shaky tower which we have falsely built and upon which we have relied. Somehow we must meet and talk to those who hate us now. Somehow we must perhaps agree to disagree, perhaps we cannot cast the entire world in what we perceive to be a sacred image. If we must turn the cheek, let us do so; if we must admit mistakes, so be it. If we must admit that we are not the greatest and the only nation in the world, surely that will be better than consigning the world to damnation.

I am 81 years old, an old man to some, but still young enough to realize how I would have wept 60 years ago had I been able to look forward to today.

Thomas Hale
Vineyard Haven