To Hell and Back - America’s Remarkable Unwillingness to Support Its Veterans -TomDispatch.com

To Hell and Back - TomDispatch.com Andrea Mazzarino, Former Soldiers Without a Future Posted on March 30, 2023 It’s the military from hell — and, no, I don’t mean the Russian army, though, it certainly qualifies. Few now doubt that Vladimir Putin is a war criminal (and not just because of those Ukrainian children his forces exported to Russia for adoption). Launching a war of aggression is crime enough (for me at least). But here’s the strange thing: despite the recent 20th anniversary of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq based on a total set of fabrications, including that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a war that would cause hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths and thousands of American ones, help launch the Islamic State, and create chaos in the region, you would be hard-pressed to find mainstream articles here referring to Bush and his top officials as war criminals. Cartoonist Rob Rogers, however, managed to catch the essence of this moment recently by drawing a half-naked Vladimir Putin, standing amid bones and blood under a headline that reads: “20 years later: the legacy of the Iraq invasion.” Scrawled on a wall behind the Russian president is a bloody “Mission Accomplished” — the infamous line displayed on a banner behind Bush as, in May 2003, he gave a speech on an aircraft carrier declaring his war a raging success. Putin is saying, “Ukraine had WMD!” Last year, however inadvertently, even Bush himself admitted to Putinesque behavior. Stumbling in a speech he was giving, he condemned “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq.” (He meant Ukraine, of course.) Today, however, TomDispatch regular, co-founder of the invaluable Costs of War Project, and military spouse Andrea Mazzarino explores a rarely acknowledged aspect of that criminal war of ours. She focuses on how so many of the American military personnel dispatched to fight it and the rest of the disastrous Global War on Terror have suffered until this very day, while this country largely turned its back, leaving them in the lurch. It is, in truth, a tale from hell, but let her explain. Tom