Michael Rice

Today marks the third anniversary of the Shock and Awe attack on Iraq. The results we know best are the deaths, to date, of over 2,300 U.S. soldiers, the maiming of tens of thousands more, and – though we are reluctant to admit it – the psychic maiming of hundreds of thousands of them, forced by their training and their needless exposure to danger to abandon their inborn inhibitions against killing.

But Shock and Awe has another, more personal meaning to me. I was ten on May 10, 1940, when I awoke in the early hours to a sky full of tracer bullets and German bombers over The Hague in The Netherlands, and the dull thud of bombs falling. The Nazis had begun their Blitzkrieg – literally, lightning war – on Holland. It was all over, except the occupation, in five days. They were days of such absolute terror, for my ten-year-old self, that I have always associated the word terrorism with bombing planes. I was lucky enough that my American visa came through ten months later – for which I am infinitely grateful – and could leave Holland and my native Germany before the Nazi occupation destroyed the little Quaker school I attended and deported and murdered the remaining Jewish students.

I remember well that more than 30 years after this Shock and Awe attack above my head, I still cringed at the sound of any low-flying plane and at the sound of every siren. Even five days of such terror deeply affected me for half my life! It is no wonder that Europeans, who have known the terror of war planes overhead, are less enthusiastic about war than the armchair soldiers who are running our United States government.

So my message is this: please try to imagine the life-long psychic damage done to the children of Iraq – the ones who survive physically – by such atrocities as the bombing of Baghdad, Basra, Fallujah and Samarra, and by the total lack of personal security in their daily lives.

We must stop this war and occupation IMMEDIATELY. Our military presence is the CAUSE not the SOLUTION of the internal violence in Iraq.

Even more than that, we must STOP THINKING OF WAR AS A VIABLE OPTION OF FOREIGN POLICY. In a time with enough hydrogen bombs to kill everyone on earth ten times over, war is simply suicidal. Finally, we must stop giving knee-jerk assent to our so-called leaders every time they put us into armed conflict.