BY GERRY CHIDIAC
Lessons in Learning
The esteemed American writer, editor and essayist William George Jordan said, “Mistakes are the growing pains of wisdom.”
In a time of global conflict, truth becomes a rare commodity. Arguably, the best place to find it is from people who are honest about the grave errors they made in the past and respond with courage and humility.
Scott Ritter was a United States Marine Corps military analyst during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. A serious mistake that he and his team made led to the Amariyah shelter bombing, incinerating 408 innocent Iraqi women and children.
To his credit, Ritter has become an outspoken advocate for peace. He is regularly interviewed by independent media outlets, most notably on the program Judging Freedom, hosted by former Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano.
The day the Americans and Israelis began their attack on Iran, a girls’ elementary school and a gymnasium where older girls were training suffered missile strikes. Ritter could not hold back his emotions seeing military personnel take the lives of innocents, as he had 35 years ago. He told Napolitano, “This is the horror of war… When I was involved in the bombing of the Amariyah shelter, we did our damnedest to make sure that it was a military target. We were wrong and it haunts you forever. What in God’s name could lead us to bomb two girls’ schools? I was involved in this. I did this for a living. I know you don’t make those mistakes. This is the sloppiest kind of targeting possible …. It’s indefensible. It’ not just inhuman, it’s criminal.”
Another regular guest on Napolitano’s show is retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, the former Chief of Staff to American Secretary of State Colin Powell. He was in part responsible for perpetuating the “weapons of mass destruction” myth, leading to the second assault on Iraq in 2003. Fortunately for Canada, Prime Minister Jean Chretien remained unconvinced, and no Canadian troops were involved in the disaster that followed. When confronted on the role he played under Powell, Wilkerson confesses, “Guilty as charged.”
In a recent interview on the American news program Democracy Now, Wilkerson drew upon the experience of his own failures and said, “I come from an administration that committed war crimes …. This (Trump) administration has committed more war crimes in the last few days than I think any country since Adolf Hitler committed. And that is an incredible condemnation of this entire process.”
Addressing American military commanders last September, Trump’s Secretary of War, and Napolitano’s former colleague at Fox News, Pete Hegseth said, “We … don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.”
After the war crimes of the Hitler regime, the world came together and revised the Geneva Conventions, creating the “stupid rules of engagement” Hegseth objects to. These laws were written by people who understood the horrors of war and the consequences of making decisions that haunt a person of conscience, someone like Ritter or Wilkerson, for the rest of their lives.
The world appears to be descending into the abyss of another world war. We are watching fuel prices increase, and experts are warning of cost-of-living increases and a possible recession. Much more significantly, innocent people are suffering in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine. Though their government will not allow the information to be disseminated, we know that they are also suffering in Israel.
To this point, most Western leaders have been tepid in their criticism of the Trump administration. Few have demonstrated the courage of Jean Chretien.
It is time to learn from the horrors that result when we are complacent.
Gerry Chidiac is an award-winning high school teacher specializing in languages, genocide studies and work with at-risk students. Check out his website here. Find him on Facebook. Or on Twitter @GerryChidiac
