The Iraq War – which since 2003 has caused well over 110,000 violent deaths according to several surveys – has also reverberated throughout the country that led the invading coalition. About 4,500 US soldiers were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2012, but many more suffered from post-war psychological trauma.Recent research has revealed that nearly half of the 2.2 million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who served in the US Military have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and experienced other mental, physical and financial problems as they struggle to readjust to civilian life at home.Iraq War veteran Edward Chin, who appears in the legendary video of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, has told RT that he is still searching for reasons to justify the bloody conflict.RT: Ten years have passed since you essentially became a symbol of the US occupation and invasion in Iraq. You were 23 at the time when you climbed that statue. What do you know about the Iraq War now that you didn’t know then?Edward Chin: What I know is that it’s lasted 10 years longer than we expected, they’re still struggling to rebuild the country, to have the stable government.RT: You climbed that statue of Saddam Hussein and wrapped its face in an American flag. Looking back on your actions: Was that an appropriate thing to do for a foreigner coming in, invading a country, climbing a statue of a man who was the leader of that country and wrapping the face with an American flag?EC: I couldn’t understand how Iraqi civilians would see it as a symbol of occupation. The reasons why we did, it was for us: We’d been in Iraq for over a month, and finally got to Baghdad. We were hoping that… it would mark the end of the war, we’d finally go home back to our families, that was the point to us. And we hadn’t seen an American flag for so long. It wasn’t something we did just to show our occupation of the country. We were spurred by the moment.RT: What do you know about the US foreign policy now that you didn’t know then?EC: We aren’t going to be told the truth, you know, about what happens. That sounds as hard to accept that you just come out of the… war to be able to control oil in that region. Of course, we’re not just going to come out and say that. We’re the military. We do what we’re told. We hoped that the right decisions are made. Once we dare, you know, we’re going to fight over honor.RT: What do you think the war was for?EC: I personally think it was to gain a foothold there, to stabilize the region. I don’t believe, you told me, it was for weapons of mass destruction. So a lot of lives lost, it was definitely not worth it. As we’ve seen, today there are still no weapons to be found. It would be worth it if it was to free a country of a dictator. But then, if that was our reason, there are lots of other dictators in the world that need to be taken out, too. I hope that it was for the right reason, I look for the right reasons. How can I not, in a way? It would be too sad for me if the reasons weren’t justified.Meanwhile, Iraq war veteran Emily Yates told RT that it is now quite clear for her that Washington’s main reason for going into the conflict was the Iraqi oil. But although the American public was made to think the war was justified by the state and the media, Yates believes the conflict’s financial cost alone could have paid for a better alternative for the US.RT: What do you know about the war in Iraq now that you didn’t know then?Emily Yates: I know now that it was entirely about oil, at least for the most part, judging from the outcome, anyway… Big oil has been proven to be the big winners in the Iraq war, and the Iraqi people – and the American people – have turned out to be the big losers.RT: What do you think about the different role America is playing in Iraq, than they were saying they were doing ten years ago?EY: It was really very clever, strategically speaking – it was well-played to the American public. My job was a public affairs specialist in the military, that’s their name for a journalist… My role was to basically make the war sound really wonderful to those of us who were fighting it. You keep the morale up, of course.But I knew that Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, because I’ve been following the news coming out of that, following the reports. And I knew it was not, you know, really, about liberation, as soon as I saw the huge mess that we made of the infrastructure in Iraq, and the fact that still to this day corporations that received these ginormous, multibillion-dollar contracts to rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure still haven’t done that, and they don’t even know where the money has gone.So seeing the way I was being told to sell the war to the soldiers, and the way the media narrative seemed to change – even the regular mainstream media that wasn’t ostensibly pro-military was still spouting the official line, contributing to all the fear-mongering. And, you know, this whole mentality the Americans still have that we were completely justified in going to Iraq. Even though the estimated projected cost of the Iraq war would be $2.2 trillion, and that added to the interest on the debt that we took out to pay for the war… [is] $3.6 trillion – that could have paid for us to get about halfway to sustainable, renewable resources.Video: /files/news/1e/a8/60/00/original_366065_emily.mxf.flv … Read More
Women and children killed in shelling near Damascus: report
AFP – At least 15 civilians, including a child and three women, died on Sunday in shelling of towns east of Damascus, a monitoring group said, while tanks pounded rebel enclaves on the Syrian capital’s edges. The army said it had laid siege to rebels east of Damascus, although the…
6 Americans, including a diplomat, killed in Afghan explosion
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Militants killed six Americans, including a young female diplomat, and an Afghan doctor Saturday in a pair of attacks in Afghanistan on Saturday. It was the deadliest day for the United States in the war in eight months.The violence – hours after the U.S. military’s top officer arrived for consultations with Afghan and U.S.-led coalition officials – illustrates the instability plaguing the nation as foreign forces work to pull nearly all their combat troops out of the country by the end of 2014.The attacks came just days after insurgents stormed a courthouse, killing more than 46 people in one of the deadliest attacks of the war, now in its 12th year.The three U.S. service members, two U.S. civilians and the doctor were killed when the group was struck by an explosion while traveling to donate books to students in a school in the south, officials and the State Department said.In a statement, Secretary of State John Kerry said the Americans included a department of defense civilian and the foreign service officer.Continue Reading… … Read More
Twelve civilians, including 11 children killed in Afghan NATO strike
“Eleven children and a woman were killed when an air strike hit their houses” in a remote area of Kunar province, provincial government spokesman Wasifullah Wasifi said.Earlier on Sunday a gunfight between Afghan-led security forces and Taliban extremists killed as many as 11 suspected militants and left one American civilian adviser dead.Five Americans, including three US soldiers, a young diplomat and a US Defense Department contractor were also killed when a car bomb targeted their convoy in the southern province of Zabul on Sunday.Recently, Afghan security forces have been taking the lead in operations against Taliban insurgency in preparation for the final withdrawal of alliance forces in 2014.US Special Forces were forced to withdraw from two Afghan provinces back in February by the government after a number of reports of “harassing, torturing and murdering innocent civilians.”Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai slammed the US forces for fueling “insecurity and instability” in troubled provinces located close to Kabul. … Read More
Surviving ‘Collateral Murder’: Soldier relives infamous WikiLeaks video
“The helicopters were approximately a mile and a half away and they were zooming in on these guys,” McCord recalls to RT’s Meghan Lopez. “And looking at it now you obviously can’t see anything.”The whistleblower website released the video on April 5, 2010, and instantly made international headlines by exposing what the War in Iraq really meant to some. The clip in question, taken from camera affixed to an Apache helicopter flown by US troops, showed Americans opening fire on civilians and journalists.“That right there is obviously a camera dangling if you really pay attention,” McCord says of one person caught on film. “That guy has an AK-47 right there,” of another.McCord was patrolling a volatile part of Baghdad on July 12, 2007 with the 216th Battalion when his colleagues started shooting. “I was about five blocks away, four or five blocks away to the left of the screen… this was a battalion wide mission,” he recalls.Upon the sound of heavy gunfire, McCord and his infantry squad began running towards the scene to provide support. Once again, though, the Apache unloaded. By the time McCord arrived, the helicopter guns were quiet and most of those on the scene were dead.“One guy’s head was off, the top of his head was completely off and his brains were on the ground and the smell, the smell still haunts me every day. I don’t know how to describe it,” he says.Then when McCord approached a van targeted by the airstrike, he heard a noise he wasn’t expecting: the cry of a little girl.“I think she was four years old and you could tell she had a wound to the stomach and I remember her looking at me and the blood around her eyes made her eyes so ghostly,” he says.McCord grabbed the girl and ran her into a nearby building. There he picked the glass out of her eyes so she could blink and handed her off to a medic.“I went back outside and we were told to take pictures and so I started taking pictures of the van,” he says.Then he discovered another child.“That’s me right there,” McCord tells Lopez as he walks her through the now infamous “Collateral Murder” clip. “That is a little boy that I originally thought was dead.”Despite their injuries, the children survived. Part of Ethan McCord, though, changed forever.“I couldn’t stop myself from crying,” he says.McCord sought out mental health afterward, and says he was mocked by his commanders and threatened with expulsion from the military.“And that’s when I started drinking,” he says. “And the mental health [doctor] had given me prescriptions: 13 prescriptions.”Things got worse, though, and McCord began imagining the worse. Routine daydreams turned to fantasies about killing own children and everyone around him. In response, he tried to end his life.“I had already begun drinking pretty heavily and I downed all of the pills and I drank a fifth of Crown Royal at 10 o’clock in the morning and my wife at the time found me and called the ambulance,” he says.After trying to take his own life, McCord was dismissed from the military. “Kicked out with no disability, no benefits from the Army whatsoever,” he says.Then McCord moved to Wichita, Kansas and attempted suicide again.“I actually wrote a poem right before I did it. Right before I put the gun in my mouth,” he says.“I don’t know if I really want to talk about it. It was really bad.”Ethan McCord’s story is tragic, but he is not alone. Thousands of veterans suffer from the effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). For those who can’t handle the stress, many have taken their own lives. They were fathers and brothers, soldiers and sons, and now they are just another casualty in American wars abroad. In the past two years alone, McCord has lost eight of his veteran brothers to suicide — and his own outlook on life hasn’t exactly improved either.“I know that I will never, ever, ever get better,” he says. “I will never get over this.”For the world, the “Collateral Murder” video was another black mark on an unpopular war. For Ethan McCord, though, it was a catalyst that made him question the entire purpose of the war.“You know America, we were John Wayne, we were wearing the white hat. Americans were always trying to help people, that’s what we do, we try to spread freedom and democracy,” he says. “With the barrel of a gun.”History will be the ultimate determinant for how the Iraq War is viewed, but for Ethan McCord and so many soldiers suffering from post-war stress, the future is far and the past is too much to cope with. … Read More
Drone strike ‘condolence payments’ for targets killed ‘an expression of sympathy toward a victim’: U.S. Army
The U.S. drone war remains cloaked in secrecy, and as a result, questions swirl around it. Who exactly can be targeted? When can a U.S. citizen be killed? Another, perhaps less frequently asked question: What happens when innocent civilians are killed in drone strikes? In February, during his…
NATO air strike kills Afghan police and civilians
A NATO air strike killed four Afghan police and two civilians on Thursday, Afghan officials said. A spokesman for the US-led NATO force in Kabul told AFP that the military was checking the information. The attack happened after Taliban insurgents attacked a local police post in eastern Ghazni…
