Bring 'em home! The Iraq war is an unconstitutional, unjustifiable conflict devouring innocent lives and abetting the growth of an increasingly lawless leviathan state. It must be ended--now.

Twenty-one-year-old Matthew Holley, born in Idaho and raised in Chula Vista, California, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on November 15. A three-time AAU Karate champion and accomplished artist, Holley followed in his father's footsteps by enlisting in the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne. "It made me very proud that he actually wanted to be like his dad," recalled Holley's father, John, at the young soldier's December 2 funeral.

Matthew got engaged shortly before leaving for Iraq. In a letter to his parents just days before he was killed, he asked them to send him some crayons so he could teach Iraqi children how to draw. "No one will ever be able to know the extent to which [Matthew's] talents could have gone," observes his mother, Stacey, who also served in the military.

John and Stacey are understandably proud of their gifted, kind-hearted, patriotic son. And, understandably, they were just as upset when his lifeless body was shipped home in the belly of a commercial jetliner. As with the mortal remains of more than 2,100 other American servicemen killed in Iraq, the body of Matthew Holley was transported to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, then sent as freight to San Diego's Lindbergh Field. Matthew's parents were outraged at the thought that the body of their only child was stuffed into a cargo hold like so much baggage.

"When someone dies in combat," observed John Holley, "[military officials] need to give them due respect for [the] sacrifice they made." Armed with knowledge of military protocol, and with the assistance of Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the Holleys were able to arrange a suitable reception. But they are aware that most families who experience similar losses aren't as fortunate.

Twenty-year-old John Donaldson, a member of Idaho's 116th Brigade Fighting Team, came home alive from Iraq, but both of his legs were claimed by an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). After months of convalescence at Walter Reed Hospital, Donaldson was greeted at the Boise airport by a small contingent of veterans from his Emmett-based National Guard unit. The welcome was organized by fellow guardsman Thomas Butler, whose leg and calf were also injured in an IED attack.

During an earlier enlistment in the Marines, Butler--who joined the Guard following the 9/11 attacks--served in the 1991 Gulf War, and he came home to an exultant welcome. "I'm 41 years old," Butler explained. "I want to see the younger guys get what I got [when I came home 15 years ago]," he told the Idaho Statesman.

A Veteran's Anguish

Matthew Stacey and John Donaldson are just two of many thousands of young Americans who have been killed or incapacitated in the ongoing Iraq war. Each combat death represents a world that has been brought to an end, a unique voice that has been stilled, a set of parents that has been deprived of a son or daughter, and often a family left without a father or mother. And every American soldier left sightless, crippled, lobotomized, or permanently disfigured from combat injuries experiences a life-altering loss.

"I go to the hospitals almost every week," related Representative John Murtha (D.-Pa.) during a November 20 appearance on NBC's Meet The Press. "I'm going to go out there again this week, and I see these young people doing the fighting.... I mean, it breaks my heart when I go out there and see these kids. I see wives who can't look at their husbands because they've been so disfigured. I saw a young fellow that was paralyzed from the neck down and his three children were standing there crying with his wife and his mother. So this is a real war."

Unlike the key architects of the Iraq war--the president and vice president, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and others--Rep. Murtha knows the reality of war from personal experience. The 73-year-old congressman served for 30 years in the U.S. Marine Corps. Wounded in combat in Vietnam, Murtha was awarded a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts for his gallant service to our nation in that flawed and unnecessary war. The first Vietnam veteran to be elected to Congress, Murtha is well known for his unstinting support for the military, his devotion to our men in uniform, and his extensive network of contacts among top military command officers. He enthusiastically supported the first Gulf War in 1991, and also supported--albeit more reluctantly--the second Bush administration's decision to renew the conflict 12 years later.

Displaying candor and humility all but unknown among politicians, Rep. Murtha now admits that he was tragically wrong to support the second Iraq War. Murtha was asked by Meet The Press host Tim Russert, "In hindsight do you now believe your vote for the war in Iraq in 2002 was a mistake?"

"Obviously, it was a mistake," replied Murtha. "I mean, all of us were misled by the information that we had. I remember going to Iraq right before--or going to Kuwait right before the war started, and they drew a line, a red line, around Baghdad, and they said, 'They're going to attack us with weapons of mass destruction.' I believed that, and so did the military, and they thought they could put up with that. But when they didn't use those weapons of mass destruction, when we didn't find them, and they kept saying 'We're going to find them' till the very end, I knew we had made a mistake." And rather than diminishing the terrorist threat to the region and the world by our invasion, he continued, "We have increased terrorism in the Middle East, is what we've done.... And since we're the target, we've increased instability in the Middle East."

Strategic Disaster

Rep. Murtha is hardly the only prominent military analyst who has concluded that the Iraq War is a disastrous and unnecessary venture. Lieutenant General William Odom (Ret.) describes the war as "the greatest strategic disaster in our history"--not in terms of its present body count, but rather because of its radiating consequences for the region and the world.

Invading Iraq, wrote General Odom in late September, "was never in the U.S.' interests and has not become so."

Odom elaborated that the U.S. invasion of Iraq only serves the interests of:

1. Osama bin Laden (it made Iraq safe for al-Qaeda, positioned U.S. military personnel in places where al-Qaeda operatives can kill them occasionally, helps radicalize youth throughout the Arab and Muslim world, alienates America's most important and strongest allies--the Europeans--and squanders U.S. military resources that otherwise might be finishing off al-Qaeda in Pakistan);

2. The Iranians (who were invaded by Saddam and who suffered massive casualties in an eight-year war with Iraq);

3. And the extremists in both Palestinian and Israeli political circles (who don't really want a peace settlement without the utter destruction of the other side, and probably believe that bogging the United States down in a war in Iraq that will surely become a war with the rest of Arab world gives them the time and cover to wipe out the other side).

Although not mentioned by General Odom, the United Nations is another beneficiary of the war. From the president on down, the Bush administration repeatedly insisted that the invasion of Iraq was necessary in order to enforce UN Security Council disarmament resolutions, thereby enhancing the power and credibility of the world body. With the U.S. now mired in a Mesopotamian morass because of what is described as a "unilateralist" foreign policy, the UN's multilateralist approach is gaining unearned prestige and unwarranted credibility.

Defenders of the administration's policy maintain that "cutting and running" now would fatally undermine our nation's prestige, and trigger a civil war in Iraq. But according to Israeli strategist and military historian Martin van Creveld, one of the world's most respected military analysts, an ignominious withdrawal is inevitable, and civil war may be as well.

"The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon--and at what cost," wrote van Creveld in the November 25 issue of The Forward. "As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge --if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not."

"For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C. sent his legions into Germany and lost them," van Creveld concludes, "Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins."

Appealing to the Power Elite

Predictably, the president and his advisers dismiss such assessments and insist that our nation must "stay the course" in Iraq--and that withdrawing before Iraq becomes a fully functional "democracy" would embolden the worldwide terrorist network, leaving our nation more vulnerable.

"In this debate, some are calling for us to withdraw from Iraq on a fixed timetable, without regard to conditions on the ground," stated Mr. Bush during a December 7 address to the Council on Foreign Relations, the most visible institution of the globalist power elite. Alluding to Rep. Murtha, the president continued: "Recently one Democratic leader came out in support of an artificial deadline for withdrawal and said an immediate withdrawal of our troops would 'make the American people safer, our military stronger and bring some stability to the region.' That's the wrong policy for our government. Withdrawing on an artificial deadline would endanger the American people, would harm our military and make the Middle East less stable. It would give the terrorists exactly what they want."

"The terrorists hope America will withdraw before the job is done, so they can take over the country and turn it into a base for future attacks," continued the president. "In the past, al Qaeda has said that American pullouts from Lebanon and Somalia showed them that America was weak and could be made to run. And now, the terrorists think they can make America run in Iraq, and that is not going to happen so long as I'm the commander in chief."

Left unaddressed by Mr. Bush is the fact that the U.S. had no just cause to intervene in Lebanon and Somalia to begin with. As with the Iraq War, our involvement in those conflicts took place without a congressional declaration of war, under the supposed authority of the president as commander-in-chief, and entangled our military in tribal and ethnic battles that had no plausible connection to our national interests. And as in Iraq, our presence in both Lebanon and Somalia actually exacerbated the problem of terrorism by making our troops a focal point for terrorist campaigns and providing terrorists with valuable tactical and battlefield experience. When our forces were finally withdrawn, the terrorists were able to claim victory.

Rather than vindicating the notion that we should persist in a similar course in Iraq, as President Bush insists, our experiences in Lebanon and Somalia demonstrate the self-defeating nature of an interventionist foreign policy and provide a powerful argument for remaining aloof from foreign conflicts--which would mean, once again, extricating our troops from Iraq immediately.

In comments made before the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia (another elitist group) on December 12, the president invoked a different defense of his policy--a version of the now familiar argument that "everything changed" on 9/11.

The September 11 attacks "changed my look on foreign policy," stated Mr. Bush during a question and answer session. "I mean, it said that oceans no longer protect us, that we can't take threats for granted; that if we see a threat, we've got to deal with it. It doesn't have to be militarily, necessarily, but we got to deal with it. We can't--can't just hope for the best anymore. And so the first decision I made ... was to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan because they were harboring terrorists.... And the second decision--which was a very difficult decision for me, by the way, and it's one that I--I didn't take lightly--was that Saddam Hussein was a threat. He is a declared enemy of the United States; he had used weapons of mass destruction; the entire world thought he had weapons of mass destruction.... And so we gave Saddam Hussein the chance to disclose or disarm, and he refused. And I made a tough decision. And knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision again. Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better place and America a safer country." (Emphasis added.)

Notable for its absence from this statement is any hint of the apocalyptic prewar rhetoric about Iraqi nuclear "mushroom clouds" sprouting over U.S. cities, or Saddam's death-dealing airborne drones leaving our airspace clotted with chemical or biological agents. Nor did the president allude to the charge, made with such confidence in his January 28, 2003 State of the Union Address, that the "British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"--a claim that had been discredited by the CIA even before it was inserted into the president's speech. And nothing was said about supposed connections between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks.

In fact, the president's statement about "knowing what I know today" appears to be a tacit admission that the administration's pre-invasion case for war has been utterly demolished. In a December 14 speech, Mr. Bush went so far as to admit that much of the pre-war intelligence on which he based his decision to invade was "wrong,"

Despite all of this, he insists that going to war was the correct decision--and that we have no choice to but persist in a disastrous policy that is rooted in deception. This view was warmly received at the CFR and by the Philadelphia World Affairs Council, and has been promoted by key organs of the establishment media, such as the Economist, Time, and Newsweek.

"Why and how we got into this war are important questions," wrote Fareed Zakaria, former editor of the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, in the December 5 issue of Newsweek. "And the administration's hands are not clean. But the paramount question right now should not be 'What did we do about Iraq three years ago?' It should be 'What should we do about Iraq today?'"

Answer: Get Out--Now!

The obvious answer to Zakaria's question is that our nation must disentangle itself from Iraq immediately. Our men and women who are fighting and dying in Iraq are not carrying out a mission to protect and defend our nation. Transforming Iraq into a "democracy"--most likely an Islamist state modeled after revolutionary Iran--will do nothing to enhance our national security. And most importantly, there is no constitutional mandate for our government to "democratize" any nation by force.

Aside from the steadily mounting toll our nation is paying as our fighting men are killed and incapacitated, the open-ended Iraq war is driving our nation into ever-deepening debt, and abetting the rapid consolidation of extra-constitutional power in the presidency. Reflect briefly on how frequently George W. Bush refers to his "decision" to go to war--as if he, like Saddam Hussein, were an autocratic ruler with the power to make such decisions unilaterally.

"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other," warned James Madison on April 20, 1795. "War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts, and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.... No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honours, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people."

The Iraq War has fulfilled Madison's prophetic warning in practically every particular. While a wartime tax increase has yet to be inflicted on our nation, our public debts have assumed literally astronomical heights in order to underwrite the Bush administration's imperial ambitions. The tangible consequences will be felt in every American household.

"In America, all the restraints, inhibitions, and modesty of the Old Republic have been blown away by the prevailing winds of the new empire," warn economic analysts Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin in their new book Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis. "In their place has emerged a vainglorious system of conceit, deceit, debt, and delusion." Subjects of this new empire believe "they are the richest people on the planet, but they have come to rely on the savings of the world's poorest people just to pay their bills.... They invade foreign countries in the belief that they are spreading freedom and democracy, and depend on lending from Communist China to pay for it."

The Bible teaches unambiguously that "the borrower is slave to the lender" (Proverbs 22:7). Rather than protecting our national independence, the Bush administration's war is actually leaving us indebted to, and potentially enslaved by, our most serious strategic rival, Communist China. And that war, as Madison predicted, threatens to extinguish our domestic liberties.

"A republic, a monarchy, or even a dictatorship is a relatively modest undertaking," observe Bonner and Wiggin. "Its scope is limited, and controlled by leading citizens either through their influence on the autocrat or by shaping public opinion. An empire, on the other hand, steps onto the world stage and plays a role that is beyond the control of the citizens. Private life becomes auxiliary, moving to a supporting role while the grand public spectacle plays itself out."

Rather than seeking and finding tangible fulfillment within the relatively narrow scope of one's personal private interests--family, church, and community--the imperial subject becomes fixated on the abstract, politicized concerns of the state. His life becomes an exercise in living vicariously through the exploits of the state's agents, particularly its military.

Bonner and Wiggin observe that the average American has "reacted just as the average Roman had reacted" during its descent from a republic to an empire. "When the [imperial] purple was hoisted, he stood up and saluted. It made him feel like a big shot. If Americans were bossing people around in Asia or the Middle East, it made him feel more important. His homeland team was winning all over the world. And if it did not always seem to be on the winning side, he knew he must support his troops and stand behind their commander-in-chief."

This isn't patriotism, the love of a specific country, its culture, and institutions. Instead, it's a form of idolatry--the worship of "collective human power," to use Arnold Toynbee's phrase. The American perspective is that power must be made subordinate to law, and that patriotism consists of a devotion to our Constitution and the republic it created, rather than to a president and his vainglorious undertakings--particularly unwarranted foreign wars.

The Americans who enlist in our military, thereby offering to interpose themselves between our nation and those who threaten it, deserve our support and gratitude. They take a solemn oath to defend our Constitution at the price of their lives, if necessary. Dispatching our fighting men overseas in an unconstitutional, undeclared war against a country that neither attacked nor threatened us is a grievous betrayal of the covenant we have with our Armed Forces.

That betrayal must end. Our troops must be brought home from Iraq--now.

What You Can Do

Readers are encouraged to ask their U.S. senators and representative to bring the troops home now. For congressional contact information, including who your senators and representative are, go to: www.thenewamerican .com/congress/contact.htm.