Why Was My Son Killed in Fallujah - The Fool's Errand In Iraq?

I nearly lost a son-in-law in Afghanistan, so I know some of the ritual of asking "why?"  Thankfully, he and we were lucky and he survived and he has made a steady recovery.  Far too many young Americans and their families were not so lucky.  And many of these less fortunate struggle to believe that their child's or spouse's life wasn't thrown away for nothing other than the cretinous hubris of George W. Bush and the ego of that megalomaniac known as Dick Cheney.  Sadly, these lives were thrown away for nothing.  At least nothing honorable and meritorious.  It was always about trying to control oil and furthering an insane anti-Muslim jihad.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at one family's struggle to avoid accepting that they were betrayed by the leaders of America who in the final analysis did not care a wit about their son or the thousands of other Americans who needlessly lost their lives.   Here are excerpts:

The sniper was subsequently freed by the Iraqi government and he might even now be back in Fallujah with the Al Qaeda forces that have taken the city where McKenna and Glover and so many other fine Americans died.

Yet, however much she wishes her son’s killer would spend the rest of his days behind bars and however hard it may be to know that Islamic militants now occupy the very place where he was killed, McKenna’s mother believes that what happens now in Iraq is a worry for the Iraqis themselves.

“It is not our war,” Karen McKenna said on Monday. “It is a civil war. It’s their problem. Not ours.”

But she also voices a firm belief that we initially went into Iraq with what she terms a “high minded” purpose.

“Once Saddam Hussein was out of the picture, we really didn’t belong there anymore,” she then adds.

She is equally certain that her son’s life was not wasted.

McKenna was quite literally an Eagle Scout as he grew up on East 2^nd Street in Brooklyn. He demonstrated that he had the makings of a future Marine after his mother sent him on a last minute errand to a nearby deli. He still had not returned a considerable time later.

The doctors later said the boy might very well have died if young John had not aided him until an ambulance arrived.  John went on to Binghamton University, where he rowed crew. He of course wished to serve his country and he was among the first wave of Marines into Afghanistan after 9/11.

McKenna, now 30, was the best kind of combat infantry officer, smart and focused and brave and fair, with a clear and unshakable sense of the right thing to do, big or small. His fellow Marines revered him.

McKenna and everybody else knew that the sniper was just waiting for someone to come to the wounded Marine’s aid. But McKenna was not going to leave Glover sprawled unattended in the street.

McKenna dashed from safety into the most mortal danger. He knelt beside Glover just as he once had by that injured boy back in Brooklyn.

“Ignoring imminent peril from heavy incoming fire, Capt. McKenna ran into the intersection in an effort to save his downed Marine,” reads the citation for the Silver Star that McKenna was awarded posthumously. “Completely exposed to enemy fire, he calmly knelt next to the stricken Marine to assess his condition. As he began to drag the Marine to a covered position, Capt. McKenna was hit by enemy fire and mortally wounded.”

The families of McKenna and Glover were assured that “as long as there is a Marine in Iraq, the sniper will remain in jail.” They learned otherwise only after McKenna’s father wrote a May 16, 2011 letter to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates. John McKenna III noted in the letter that the sniper who killed his son and Glover had been captured by their fellow Marines.

The unfortunate truth is that thousands of wonderful young Americans died for nothing other than George W. Bush's idiocy and Dick Cheney's greed - Haliburton made billions - and mania.  Worse yet, if Bush and Cheney are never held accountable, we will have made the next Iraq like disaster happen all the sooner.  America truly doesn't learn from the past.  Bush and Cheney are war criminals and need to be tried and punished severely.