Iraq

It has been 10 years since then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's U.N. speech on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. I watched the secretary's presentation intently on assignment to Fort Jackson, S.C. that day. The presentation, of course, would make the final case for war with Iraq before the world, Congress and, arguably most importantly, the American people. Like many of my colleagues on active duty, I had been highly skeptical of this pretext for war while serving as a military planner, particularly over what many regarded as plausible exaggerations and outright distortions.

Towson junior John Paukovits spent a portion of this week worrying about Valentine's Day. It was a world away from his concerns as a soldier in the U.S. Army. Twice in seven years, Paukovits was deployed to Iraq.. Honorably discharged in 2011, Paukovits acted on his desire to pursue a college degree and rediscovered his love for lacrosse at Towson, where he is now a short-stick defensive midfielder. "Socially, it is a little bit different, but on the team, I feel like I fit right in," said Paukovits, who at 28 is the oldest player on the Tigers roster by six years.

A soldier who lost all of his limbs in the Iraq War received double arm transplants at Johns Hopkins Hospital last month in a rare procedure that has already begun to restore some normalcy to his life. Hopkins doctors are to speak in detail about the rare procedure performed on 26-year-old Brendan Marrocco in a press briefing today. The Army infantryman lost his arms and legs in a roadside bomb attack in 2009 becoming the first soldier of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to lose all four limbs in combat and survive.

I was pleased when the U.S. won its war against Iraq, which hopefully meant the establishment of the first democratic nation in the Middle East. That would be an accomplishment for the whole world to behold. The outcome placed Iraq in the category with earlier battle victims — Germany after World War I, Japan after World War II and South Korea after the Korean Conflict — where she was subject to having a U.S. standing army to assure and protect the establishment of a government by and for the people.

The terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was a tragedy, and four people died. Republicans are sure that Susan Rice and the president are lying about what happened and say they are "not satisfied" with the explanations that were given. But how many American military personnel, contractors and Iraqi citizens have died, and how many more have sustained traumatic, life-changing injuries, because of the lies that got us into the Iraq War? Where is the outrage over that?

Navy linebacker Brye French had never met Brendan Looney, only hearing stories about the former academy lacrosse star and his two brothers from longtime coach Richie Meade. Then one day during French's sophomore year, Meade told his team that the eldest Looney brother had died in Iraq. French, who had come to Navy to play both lacrosse and football, began to understand the reasons he was in Annapolis when he heard about Looney's death in a helicopter crash. It was further clarified for French when the lacrosse team attended the funeral of Navy SEAL from Silver Spring.

Joseph Bathgate calls them "the Hollywood questions. " When college classmates learn he was a machine gunner for the Marine Corps for two tours in Iraq, they want to know: Did anyone ever shoot at you? Ever get hit? And there's the big one. You ever kill anyone? "It's unusual, I understand that, what I've done," says Bathgate, 24, of Dundalk, now out of the military and studying kinesiology at Towson University. "Still, it's annoying. … Naturally, I feel different" from the other, mostly younger students on campus.

If you had told me in 2000 that I could find something to admire about President George W. Bush, I would have been astounded. Yet in 2003, when he traveled in secret to Iraq to share Thanksgiving dinner with the soldiers in the war zone, I greatly admired his action. At the time, there wasn't a visitor to Iraq with more of a target on his back. He was not only absent from his own table on the holiday, he put his life in danger to do it. Now, in 2012, I am ecstatic that President Barack Obama has been re-elected.

Last December, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared the end of the war in Iraq. Whether there will be an end to repercussions from that war remains to be seen. One such repercussion involves a wounded photojournalist named Sarah and her reporter boyfriend James in "Time Stands Still," a 2010 play by Donald Margulies that opens Everyman Theatre 's season this week. "America has been at war for 10 years," says Everyman artistic director Vincent Lancisi. "We're going to see a lot more plays like this.

As I read the two recent articles in the Sun about terrible upheaval in Iraq ("More violence feared in Iraq as 3 blasts kill 9," Aug. 16, and "Bombings, shootings kill about 70 across Iraq," Aug. 17), my saddened Naval veteran's heart beat out the thought that the U.S. citizens should again be reminded of President Barack Obama's self-centered political ploy as he withdrew our troops from Iraq at the end of 2011. Unfortunately, now without the troops' assistance and protection, Iraq soon became a center of civil strife and therefore was unable to develop into the first democracy in the Arab Middle East, which indeed would have served as an example for the other surrounding turbulent nations, and it also eliminated Iraq as a base for the U.S. and allied forces from which they could have operated more efficiently in the protection of our interests and responsibilities in controlling, and hopefully eliminating, the radical terrorists, includingal-Qaidaand the Taliban, who have openly declared many times that their main objective in life was to annihilate every freedom loving individual from the face of the earth.