Richard Stengel, exactly what part of "dinosaur stuck in a tar pit" didn't you understand?

On The Chris Matthews show, Richard Stengel, the managing editor of TIME gives us a chilling new report that the Pentagon is releasing about the serious head injuries our troops are sustaining in Iraq.
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Stengel: When we got into the Iraq war we didn’t know how long it would last. When we got into the Iraq war we didn’t know how much it would cost. It’s lasted longer, it’s cost more than we ever expected. The real toll is coming out now. The Pentagon is releasing a report saying, one in five American serviceman and women who have been in Iraq are coming back with brain injuries. Mild, traumatic brain injuries. More than 250,000 people. That legacy of that will last all of our life times and it’s incalculable.

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/01/21/
pentagon-report-due-1-in-5-soldiers-returning-from-
iraq-with-brain-injuries/

First, 1 out of 5 troops is really high considering the rate of PTSD is 1 out of 3 exposed to a traumatic event. That would mean over 80% have been exposed to traumatic events at least once.

The part that got me in all of this was how angry I am with the media. Richard Stengelis managing editor of TIME and considering TIME has been around for a long time, along with some fantastic reporters and photographers through the years, I'm pretty sure they have a massive archival system that they could refer back to whenever they saw the need to look back at a little history. In this case, they didn't have to go back further than 1991. Heck, they didn't even have to go back that far but considering this all involved the first Gulf War, it would have been a really good place to start to figure out what they claim "they didn't know" what they were getting into.

FROM PBS INTERVIEW
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/schwarzkopf/1.html

Schwarzkopf
"Plain and simply, Washington came to me after we had won an overwhelming victory at a minimum loss of lives and said "We want to stop the war at midnight tonight. Do you have any problem with that?"

And my answer was "No I don't have any problem with that". So it's just that simple.

Schwarzkopf: Wait a minute. Wait. Just a minute now. Realistically, it is not a military decision to go to war any more than it is a military decision to end a war.

Schwarzkopf:
So anyone who says it was a military decision to end the war is a cop out artist, that's what it is. OK, it's just that simple. Again, I wasn't in the room, any more than I was in the room on the 6th October briefing that I dearly wished I had been there, but I wasn't there. So I know nothing about what went on in that room. I know what I said, I know what said to me on the other end of the telephone and I have explained a thousand times how that came down.


Schwarzkopf: On the question of going to Baghdad. If you remember the Vietnam war, we had no international legitimacy for what we did. As a result we, first of all, lost the battle of world public opinion and eventually we lost the battle at home.

In the Gulf War we had great international legitimacy in the form of eight United Nations Resolutions, every one of which said "Kick Iraq out of Kuwait", did not say one word about going into Iraq, taking Baghdad, conquering the whole country and hanging Saddam Hussein. That's point number one.

Point number two, had we gone on to Baghdad, I don't believe the French would have gone and I'm quite sure that the Arab coalition would not have gone, the coalition would have ruptured and the only people that would have gone would have been the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

And, oh by the way, I think we'd still be there, we'd be like a dinosaur in a tar pit, we could not have gotten out and we'd still be the occupying power and we'd be paying one hundred percent of all the costs to administer all of Iraq.

Thirdly, I don't think we could have found Saddam Hussein if we'd done that. We forget the lessons of Panama. We had ten thousand Americans on the ground in Panama before we went into that very small country, we still couldn't find a fellow named Noriega, so what makes you think that we would go into a nation the size of Iraq and be able to find one person who has all the ability in the world to escape and hide and fly out of the country.

But I think, more importantly, there's a strategic consideration. Saddam Hussein portrayed that war from the very beginning as "This is not a war against Iraqi aggression against Kuwait. This is the Western colonial lackey friends of Israel coming in to destroy the only nation that dare stand up to Israel, that is Iraq".

Had we proceeded to go on into Iraq and take all of Iraq, I think that you would have millions of people in that part of the world who would say Saddam was right, that that was the objective.

Now there were many more interviews and speeches given following the Gulf War. Some by Cheney and some by Bush 41. What is very telling about all of this history is that they did in fact know in full what they were getting into, what would happen, how long it would go on and what kind of a toll it would take on the men and women sent to do it. They knew what would happen to the Iraqi people. They knew what it would do historically to the minds of the men and women who survived but were wounded and they did absolutely nothing about any of it.

I changed the name of my other blog from Nam Guardian Angel G I Care to Screaming In An Empty Room for this very reason. The media all played a role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq along with everything that came with it and they had a responsibility to report the facts to prepare this nation because the president did not. They failed and now they are trying to play catch up to what they cannot cover up.

No one cared about the troops or they would have increased all services to make sure they would meet the need for all of them because they knew exactly what kind of carnage would follow this. No one did anything in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and baby steps were taken in 2007 once the GOP was no longer in power. So please tell me what part of any of this was not understood and "not known" because I would really love to know how any of these people got their jobs when I knew it and I'm unemployed.
Kathie Costos
Namguardianangel@aol.com
http://www.namguardianangel.org/
http://www.namguardianangel.blogspot.com/
http://www.woundedtimes.blogspot.com/

"The willingness with which our young people are likely to serve in any war, no matter how justified, shall be directly proportional to how they perceive veterans of early wars were treated and appreciated by our nation."

- George Washington