His Dying Cry to be Heard
His name is Col. Ted Westhusing, at one point the highest ranking officer to die in Iraq, committed suicide there in 2005. Editor and Publisher has the skinny on why he did so. Because of PTSD? Because of a Dear John letter? No. Col. Ted Westhusing committed suicide because his [...]
His name is Col. Ted Westhusing, at one point the highest ranking officer to die in Iraq, committed suicide there in 2005. Editor and Publisher has the skinny on why he did so. Because of PTSD? Because of a Dear John letter? No. Col. Ted Westhusing committed suicide because his role was to deal with ethics, and that was a losing cause in this Bush Administration war.
Col. Ted Westhusing, a West Point scholar, put a bullet in his head in Iraq after reporting widespread corruption. His suicide note — complaining about human rights abuses and other crimes — was addressed to his two commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, now leader of the U.S. “surge” effort in Iraq. It urged them to “Reevaluate yourselves….You are not what you think you are and I know it.”
That’s only the slug leading into the article. Please read the rest. Our Army has many good and loyal and ethical soldiers. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has put them in situations so untenable that they cannot function. In the case of Col. Westhusing, he was committed to ethics, with a Ph.D., for God’s sake. How could he hold up against the corruption of Bush Administration policies?
May he rest in peace.
Just finished this and dropped by.
Brutal. A powerful article. An indictment.
Too bad Westhusing didn’t stay alive to publicly fight the powers that be.
Did you ever think they shut him up. He reported/was assigned by Gen. Petraeus to this most important job and was going home with the highest of respect for what he could say because of his background…….you tell me.
A Man Of The Utmost Honor……………………………..
It’s old hat by now, that the Iraq war is going dismally, that the Bush Administration is huffing fantasy gas, that the very idea of trying to create a new American-style democracy in the current-day Middle East is worthy of Neil Simon at his caustic funniest.
What’s unexpected, though, is for a shadow of real honor to arise from such a dismal swamp.
I’m not talking about the sincere efforts put forth by our military personelle every day in Iraq, in the service of what they hope will be a chance for that country to climb out of its abyss. Rather, I’m talking about the sacrifice of one particular, outstanding example of the virtues we ask of our soldiers.
I’m talking about Colonel Ted Westhusing, who took his own life in trailer 602A in Camp Dublin, in Bagdad, Iraq, on June 5th, 2005. He was 44 years of age, and was survived by a wife and three young children. I only recently learned of his story here .
Why does a suicide merit such lauds? Because the readily evident integrity of the man himself was only too obviously what drove him to it. Ted Westhusing was a graduate of West Point, and subsequently an instructor there, and took seriously what the academy teaches its cadets: that a cadet and officer will not lie, cheat, steal, nor tolerate those who do. He believed that the Iraq war was for a just cause, and trusted his commanders (including, needless to say, the Commander In Chief) to have only the most honorable motives for the actions they took and commanded.
Such principled devotion to duty commands respect from anyone, of any persuasion. I happen to have believed from the start that this war was an ethical abortion to put Augusto Pinochet’s pocket purges to shame; but I’m from military stock, and recognize a hero when I see one. Colonel Ted Westhusing was one such.
And just where is the heroism in suicide?
Lets start with a couple of observations. First, a soldier - any soldier of any rank - is beholden to his commanders, no matter what the issue at hand, and must follow their orders. No one understood this better than Ted Westhusing, who had inculcated cadets in these principles. If a soldier takes issue with his commanders, he has a very limitted pallet of options. He can express his reservations to the commanders in question, given that they give him permission to do so; or if that permission is explicit or implicit in the mandate that accompanies his defined position.
If the issue is urgent enough, he can go over his commanders’ heads to the next level of command, but he had better damn well be right when he does so; or he’ll be guilty of operating outside of the chain of command - and there are precious few offenses that are worse than that, in the armed forces.
Finally, he can refuse to follow orders that he judges are illegal - but again, he had better be right in his judgement. One of the first things you give up, when you sign up, is the right to judge for yourself what’s right or wrong. In a nutshell, that’s why I never signed up. Westhusing did, and I can’t fault him for it. The military won’t work, if everyone in it is free to exercize their conscience.
It was his conscience that drove him to take his own life. He could not countenance what he saw happening around him - the way that Iraqi commanders treated the war effort as just another occasion for graft and bribes and theft; and the way American contractors took it all in stride, and looked the other way as war materiel disappeared into thin air; ultimately, as we know, to re-appear in hands not at all friendly to the American effort.
It’s not clear, but I would assume that Westhusing made efforts to inform his commanders of the situation, and met with a wall of intentional ignorance. His suicide note says as much.
Given this, his options were starkly clear. He could rotate home (only a month away, at the time of his suicide) and remain silent, as his oath of service demanded; but such a choice would in effect condone the corruption he was witness to. He could violate his oath and go outside of the chain of command, to aprise someone of the situation; but that would put him in the wrong nearly as much as those he sought to expose. Or he could do the only honorable thing a soldier can do, when faced with a dilemma like this.
The only acceptable excuse, for a soldier not performing his defined duty, is his death.
Westhusing was the sort who took this sort of question seriously. He was literally driven to fall on his sword. Given who he was, I don’t think he overtly used his death to try to subvert the corruption he saw around himself, but saw it as the only honorable way to refuse to participate in the corruption himself. He doubtless hoped that his action might have a beneficial effect; but remember, he addressed his suicide communication to his commanding officers, leaving the outcome up to them. And he knew pretty well where they stood, already.
I don’t know what I would have done, but in his place I hope I would have had the courage to do what he did. He had everything to live for, but no honorable way to live for it. And for him, honor was everything. If he had accepted the corruption of all he held dear, he would have been a broken man; he certainly could not have gone back to West Point to teach more cadets about the virtues of honor, as he had intended when he took the Iraq appointment. He could not have faced his growing children, and taught them that there are more important principles than personal survival, if he himself had sacrificed his principles on that altar.
This was a man of principle, one of a sadly vanishing breed. He was of the lineage of the devoted Samurai who, like him, could only express their displeasure at their lord’s will by spilling their entrails on his tatami.
Colonel Ted Westhusing’s suicide was not an act of cowardice; was not a failing of imagination, or a sin of hubris, or a mistaken bid for twisted immortality. It was the only honorable option left, for a man to whom honor was life. It was the only message he could leave his young children, to show how a man should make a choice, when there are no choices left to make. It was the only way he had to show America that there are things more important than gain; more important than profits; more important than the sadly twisted sort of patriotism that will support a leader when what he advocates is evil.
It’s time to end the madness.
What sort of leader is George W. Bush, if he needs such offerings of blood? What sort of man makes jokes about WMDs under his desk, when good men and women are dying for his arrogance? Dying for the profits of his friends? What kind of world are we making, where such men are king?
Bush, Cheney, and Rove took something beautiful, the trust and honor of America’s service-men and -women; and made it into something ugly, perverted, and now despised; to suit the hegemonic imperative of their obscenely aquisative fellow-travelers. The world is their oyster, and they don’t care where, or in whose eyes, the fragments of shell fly.
Government for the people is anathema to them, as is the very concept of an honorable peace and security for all the world’s people. Only endless war will serve their agenda of endless profit. They have shown themselves for what they are; and what they are can only be rejected, by all who call themselves human.
They must be vomitted from the gut of humanity; before humanity dies of the poison.
I’ll leave the last words to Colonel Ted Westhusing, of honored memory:
“Life needs trust. Trust is no more for me here in Iraq.”
Colonel Weshusing confronted Gen Petraues directly in a meeting that last day about the corruption and the death squads, the murders; since he was getting no where with Gen Fil. Colonel Ted was willing to put his job on the line with Petraues, confront him directly to prove it and was told to stand down or suffer the major consequences and they would be severe. Col. Ted said he would not..he wanted a independant military lawyer…no way said P………..2 hours later, there were heated confrontations/arguments in his personal office trailer and then found dead an hour or two later, with all the evidence altered..by the contractors he was going to expose………. Petraues and Fil were sent back to the US, shortly thereafter to hide……until it blew over. You know where they are now…….