Former White House advisor Karl Rove spoke at the University of Connecticut in Storrs where he was confronted by an Iraq War veteran who said that Rove should apologize for the war, reported RawStory. Rove did not apologize.
“I saw my friends torn apart and Iraqi children screaming for their parents as indiscriminate shrapnel scarred them and us in ways that we will never know,” added Henowitz. “We were exposed to more questions about life and death than any 20 year old should have. These scars stay with me and other veterans who are now one of the highest demographics to commit suicide at a rate of 22 suicides per day, and over thousands disabled.”
Henowitz continued and started lay some hard reality onto Rove.
“I have taken responsibility for my actions and dealt with my demons while advocating for a peaceful resolution of a war that was an act of aggression with no clear goal,” said the former soldier, Ryan Henowitz. “Can you take responsibility and apologize for your decision in sending a generation to lose their humanity and deal with the horrors of war, which you have never had the courage to face? Will you apologize to the millions of fathers and mothers who lost their children on both sides of this useless war?”
Henowitz continued and started lay some hard reality onto Rove.
However, the war hawk remained insistent that going to Iraq was the right thing because, as Rove put it, Saddam Hussein “thumbed his nose at the international community.” That’s how Rove justified a decade-long war that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. He boiled it down to an international relations snafu.
“The United States government and the United States military was right to [start the war],” said Rove. “We should be proud of what we were able to do in Iraq and we should be sorry that we left them alone, because when we left them, things deteriorated.”
How Rove can look a veteran in the eye and say that is beyond logic. It’s easy for people like Rove, Dick Cheney, and Bill Kristol to say things like that because they didn’t have to fight in the desert. They made other people do it.
