Iraq War: A Yankee view and a Mississippi view

Actually, I don't know if Rosanne Cash considers herself a Yankee or not.  She grew up in California, as I recall, and has lived for years in New York.  But she's also lived in Nashville and has a very famous connection through her late father Johnny.

I love her music and her songwriting.  But I'm at least as much a fan of her prose.  At her Website she does a monthly column.  In her post election edition (11/08/04; scroll to the bottom and click on Archives if a later column is in the opening-page slot), she says:

During the Republican convention a lot of visitors came to New York for the first time. In the New York Times, there were many interviews with delegates to get their impressions of the city, and I must say that most were complimentary. Generally, a mutually respectful attitude prevailed. But one gentleman, from Iowa, said something that just stunned me. He was complaining about the ‘liberal elite’ (that phrase again. Can we come up with something else to villify Democrats who drink white wine and enjoy a good discussion?) and New York in general, and said that ‘New Yorkers could learn a thing or two about patriotism from people in the heartland’. I couldn’t believe that someone could come to our city, which had been attacked by terrorists, and be so ignorant and disrespectful. Did he not see the firefighters and police officers who went into the burning buildings to sacrifice their lives? Did he not see the best in all of us in this city come to the surface under the most trying circumstances? Did he not see the American flag raised in the midst of the destruction? Is THIS what people in the heartland think of us, that we don’t know the ‘right’ way to be patriots?

Okay, I’m tired of pandering. If I posted my hate mail, you would be stunned into silence. You cannot imagine the things all those Christian patriots have said to me, including well-worded directives to go have intimate relations with a certain recently deposed dictator. I am actually a bit of a prude, with very strict, Catholic schoolgirl manners, and I was shocked into silence for a short time. Not any more. I have felt despondent in the last week, and angry, and shocked, but I take hope from something Eckhart Tolle said: “Even within the seemingly most unacceptable and painful situation is concealed a deeper good, and within every disaster is contained the seed of grace.” It is time to find the seed, and plant it.

I love this country. It’s worth fighting for—NOT by going to war on false pretenses, but by speaking the truth, and not being cowed into silence by people whose opinions have been trimmed and molded to an exact party line, and whose intolerance and disrespect will take your breath away.

But go read the whole thing.  She's a great writer, and I like her view of the world.  (For some of that breathtaking intolerance and disrespect, consult my Chuckie Watch feature.)

She has apparently taken down the excellent description she wrote not long after the 9/11 attacks, to which she was an eyewitness.  But she doesn't talk about it some in the above column above.  And, by the way, she calls herself "Mrs. L" when she signs her column, so don't get confused.

Mrs. L has been a critic of the Iraq War all along.  For instance, in her 04/10/03 column she wrote:

As you may know, I have been deeply opposed to the war in Iraq since the beginning, for reasons which I have outlined in the past. Now, with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein appearing to be imminent, if not already accomplished, I remain opposed in principle to the means which took us there, in defiance of the U.N. and most of our former allies, and the price we have paid and will continue to pay in human lives, economic disaster, material destruction, and the redirecton of funds desperately needed here at home to provide 'services' for Iraq, some of which are not available to many people here in the United States (100% health care? How about starting in our own backyard?) I still believe that a) it won't be long before the corporations who have vested interests and who advise the Pentagon and lobby Congress will start dividing up the oil fields, and b) that our grandchildren and possibly great-grandchildren will be cleaning up the mess we have created; politically, diplomatically and spiritually, and c) we will suffer major repercussions here at home, having inflamed the entire Middle East with our 'doctrine of pre-emption'.

Remember, this was while the initial phase of the war, the conventional combat phase, was still under way.  It's a reminder of how much reality has imposed  on Bush's grand Mesopotamian adventure.  The idea of setting up social services for the Iraqis hasn't yet made it onto the agenda; we're still trying to ensure basic security and prevent an all-out civil war.

The Mississippi view on the war comes from Bill Minor, a long-time Mississippi reporter and columnist:  Anxiously, 3,500 Guardsmen waiting to be deployed to Iraq Jackson Clarion-Ledger 12/05/04.  In this column, he refers to a series of reports by Matt Williamson on Mississippi National Guard members preparing to go off to the Iraq War.  Apparently it was a recent series, but I wasn't able to find it online.  If anyone reading this comes across it online, please post a link in the comments.  Minor writes:

While yellow "support our troops" ribbons are brandished on automobiles by many citizens who do not question whether American troops should be fighting in Iraq or wonder how long they will be there, these questions are seriously on the minds of wives left at home by the departing guardsmen.

There's "plenty of gray hair" among the soon-to-be-deployed Mississippi Guardsmen he saw at Camp Shelby, Williamson told me.

With a reference indicating that he himself must be around 80 (that sounds right to me from the last time I saw him), he describes at some length his criticisms of the war, including:

When I went off to war in WWII, there was a clear and present danger to our national security on two sides of the world from precision war machines of the Axis powers, Germany and Japan, that had already cost the lives of many Americans and our allies.

Iraq posed no such threat to us before George Bush pre-emptively invaded Iraq on the presumption that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and was linked to master terrorist Osama bin Laden. Both have proved false.

Americans were made to believe the invasion was a response to the 9-11 tragedy that killed nearly 3,000 when disciples of bin Laden hijacked airliners and smashed them into New York's World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in Washington.

Yet none of the 9-11 terrorist hijackers were Iraqis, and none was linked to the Iraqi dictator who had been greatly weakened by 12 years of United Nations sanctions and U.S. and British military planes that kept a constant no-fly zone over Iraq.

What role the Mississippi Guardsmen will have when they reach Iraq is unclear, but unquestionably they will be going into dangerous territory where the life of any foreigner is in jeopardy.

When these weekend warriors got into the National Guard, they doubtless thought their primary mission was to serve the home front, to fight fires, stop looting and save lives when a tornado or hurricane hit.

Now they are being thrust onto the world stage into what could be judged by history as this nation's worst foreign policy blunder. Our prayers go with them.

Possibly "this nation's worst foreign policy blunder."  That sounds about right to me.