Mid-West towns sour on Iraq War

It seems that the most important factor in changing minds about the war are casualties. Most of the people still don't get it. They still think that the war was a good idea and that the US was justified to invade Iraq and topple Hussein. There is nothing about the war being illegal and unjustified not even about the lies that they were told about WMD. It is all about losing local people. It seems that only this can be make the war even meaningful to mmany people in a way that might overcome the knee-jerk patriotism that seems prevalent in citizens of most countries.


Midwest Towns Sour on War as Their Tolls Mount

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 14, 2007; A01

TIPTON, Iowa -- This farming town in Cedar County buried Army Spec.
Aaron Sissel during the Iraq war's ninth month. It buried Army Spec.
David W. Behrle during the 51st. Along the way, as a peaceable
community's heart sank, its attitude toward President Bush and his Iraq
strategy turned more personal and more negative.

Sissel and Behrle were popular young sons of Tipton, a community of
3,100 where anonymity is an impossibility. Sissel bagged groceries at
the supermarket and often bowled at Cedar Lanes. Behrle served, just
two
years ago, as Tipton High's senior class president and commencement
speaker.

The town, by all accounts, once gave Bush the benefit of the doubt for
a
war he said would make America safer and a mission he said was
accomplished four years before Behrle died. But funeral by funeral,
faith in the president and his project to remake Iraq is ebbing away.

Deep into a battle with no visible end, many Republican and Democratic
voters here say the cause is no longer clear, the war no longer seems
winnable and the costs are too high. After mourning Behrle, 20, and
Sissel, 22, Tipton lost its heart for the fight and the president who
is
vowing to press on.

"It's hitting all around us," said Jim Allen, a salesman and former
Bush
voter at Fields Mens Wear on the town square. "Once we got there, I
thought, 'Let's get it taken care of.' Now it's dragged on and on. It's
just every day, you hear of more casualties."

In the first six months of the year, 125 troops from 10 Midwestern
states died in Iraq, the bloodiest stretch of the war so far. Over the
past year, 239 from those states have died, compared with 129 from July
2003 to June 2004.

While opposition to the war has been stronger and more visible on the
East and West coasts, small towns in the heartland and the South have
provided the Bush administration with some of its most steadfast
backers. But that support has cracked amid the echoes of graveside
bagpipes and 21-gun salutes, which have been heard with greater
frequency in recent months in small Midwestern communities.

Two prominent Republican senators who broke with the president this
month come from the nation's midsection. Sens. George V. Voinovich
(Ohio) and Richard G. Lugar (Ind.) said Bush needs to find a new
direction in Iraq and a way to start bringing the troops home. A third
defector, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), said he began to reassess his
position after conversations with the grieving families of dead
soldiers.

Rep. Bruce Braley, a freshman Iowa Democrat who favors a firm timetable
for Iraq, heard the pain when he met with the families of two fallen
soldiers, Pfc. Katie M. Soenksen and Cpl. Stephen D. Shannon, on
Memorial Day. He said people shouted words of support -- "Good job!"
and
"Keep the pressure on!" -- as he marched in Fourth of July parades.

It is "the intensity and passion" of the desire for an end to the war
that strike Braley as new.

"There's more unity in the opposition now," said Braley, whose district
adjoins Tipton. "It was always easier to find optimists about the
chances of success in Iraq two years ago. You don't now find people
talking that way, even the most ardent supporters of the president's
policy."

Retired electrician Bob Peck voted twice for Bush. The first time, in
2000, Democrat Al Gore defeated Bush in Cedar County by two votes,
4,033
to 4,031. Peck would not vote for him again, even if he could.

"The war and the way he's handled it. We've lost too many boys," said
Peck, 71, a former Marine, as he sipped a drink at Veterans of Foreign
Wars Post 2537. "We've been there long enough, and it's not doing
anything. It doesn't look like it will."

Woody Marshall, a Vietnam War-era Navy veteran, described his own
evolution as he trained his gaze on an elegantly stitched tapestry of a
smiling Aaron Sissel in a VFW corridor. At first, he was "thrilled"
that
U.S.-led troops toppled Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical government.

"I've never heard anybody now say the war is okay. Maybe around two
years ago," said Marshall, who said Sissel was very close to a pair of
his in-laws, who owned the bowling alley. "It's time to get the hell
out. It's a holy war, and you're not going to win it, no matter what
you
do."

The in-laws are Ernie and Kay Jennings. Sissel spent a lot of time at
Cedar Lanes, becoming a smooth bowler and loyal worker under Ernie
Jennings's tutelage. He sometimes stayed past midnight, talking about
life as a teenager whose parents had split up. He joined the National
Guard while in high school.

Then came Iraq.

"When he left," Jennings said, "we felt that all of them were coming
back, and they all did, but one of them was horizontal. That was one of
the roughest times in my life. He was like an adopted son."

Jennings is an energetic talker, but there are moments when he is
discussing Sissel that his voice breaks and he cannot continue.

"I have mixed feelings about the war," Jennings said. "I'm a
Republican.
I agree with most things President Bush has done. I just don't know if
we know what to do over there. I believe we have to come up with an
exit
strategy."

When word reached Tipton in May that Behrle was dead, Allen, the
salesman, remembers thinking, "Out of the whole state of Iowa, why us?"
He considers the war every time Behrle's father, a good customer, comes
into the store. Others mentioned the same thing, in a town where
neighbors constantly cross paths.

Regular business at City Hall stopped for a week before Behrle's body
came home, as staff members made sure routes were cleared, streets were
swept and flags reached the right places. "In a town of 3,000, you
wouldn't expect two of them to be killed," Mayor Don Young said.

The town's weekly newspaper, the Tipton Conservative, devoted its
entire
front page to the rain-swept, flag-bearing crowds that greeted the
return of Behrle's body. Photos of Behrle, from a childhood Halloween
to
a tour in Iraq, filled an inside page.

Included in the brief text was a comment from his family: "He is 'The
Man,' and our hero."

Dixie Pelzer remembers there were three of them, soldiers in uniform
who
came to the door at about a quarter to 10 one night in late May. She is
Behrle's mother, and she knew it was real -- David had been killed by a
roadside bomb. "Then it all just started," said Pelzer, who works with
student organizations at the University of Iowa.

The six weeks since have been a fog, she said, an initiation into a
parallel world occupied by the families of the 3,611 U.S. troops who
have died in Iraq. The support of friends and strangers has been
magnificent, but her son is still gone, buried on an Iowa hilltop where
she likes to think he would have been happy.

Behrle, she said, did not join the military in high school to embrace a
grand cause. He enlisted at age 18 because he liked the idea. He told
his mother he would spend three years in uniform, then go to college.

"It's not like he was a patriot, or political. It was just something he
wanted to do," Pelzer said quietly, speaking with a reporter for the
first time. "He said, 'It's okay. I'll be fine, Mom.' "

She wondered if he would be fine. It was 2005. She figured Iraq would
be
calmer by the time his unit deployed.

Like so many Tipton residents who saw the war delivered like an
unwelcome package when the cortege passed, Pelzer realized that it took
her son's death for her to focus on the war.

"I don't know that you can win," she said of the chances of victory in
Iraq. "But if you can't accomplish what you need to accomplish, get
them
out of there. There's been enough. One is too many."