Special Compline of Lament and Remembrance dated March 19, 2023

RantWoman has meant to do SOMETHING to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of the launch of Gulf War 2, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Here is such Light as comes to RantWoman

Video of special compline of lament and remembrance, St Mark's cathedral March 19, 2023

WMD Inspector Bush should have faced War Crimes trials and Mehdi Hasan has just blistering commentary

We MUST talk about Donald J. Trump; we MUST also talk about George W Bush.

Mehdi Hasan and Tom Nichols on Iraq / Bush and Putin / Ukraine

RantWoman is not nostalgic about a Friends World Committee on Consultation Section of the Americas gathering whee Arab Americans spoke of "my name is random" when passing through TSA checkpoints and where others said things along the lines of "if war in inevitable, let's get it over with."

RantWoman remembers MASSIVE antiwar demonstrations all over the world, although there is crickets about any mention of that in most restrospectives RantWoman has encountered..

And today RantWoman was remembering in a email exchange about a law student with PTSD and issues with VA benefits he should be entitled to: RantWoman recalls the cost of pensions and benefits for US troops not even being figured in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's calculations of war costs.

Example story: former US Senate candidate Tiffany Smiley and her husband scotty

[Correction and Blindness related digression The story above is factually inaccurate though about Scotty being the first blinded veteran to return to active duty. There is at least one other one from the Iraq era. He became a campus recruiter which to RantWoman seems like a tough sell for people considering signing up. More  importantly after WWII the military specifically kept some blinded troops on active duty so they could be ordered to do mobility training and other rehabilitation.]

And we will not even discuss the truly SHITTY treatment and bureaucratic mazes that interpreters the US depended on had to try to hack through to achieve the refugee status their sacrifices entitled them to.

RantWoman is thinking off all this contemplating the current frightening layers of the war in Ukraine, but more on that in another post.