Esteban Santiago, the Ft. Lauderdale airport shooter, is an Iraq war veteran. Prior to executing five innocent people and wounding seven, he told the FBI that voices were telling him to watch ISIS videos. Although clearly exhibiting the possible symptoms of a thought disorder, the authorities were not able to connect him with mental health treatment.
Santiago was able to obtain a gun legally, bring it to the airport, and check it in his bag. Because some states allow guns everywhere including schools, shopping malls, and even airports, no one read the red flags that would have stopped the horror that changed too many lives forever.
Although violence is committed by a tiny percentage of those with mental illness, Santiago had military training in the use of guns. He’d confessed to having thoughts of violence when he went to those who might have been able to stop him. But he was not stopped. The powerful gun lobby has ensured that the right to bear arms be interpreted in ways far beyond any safe limit in our modern and complex society.
Santiago’s participation in the war in Iraq may have exacerbated or contributed to his mental illness. He might have been struggling with the moral injury of being in an unjustified war or dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) – or both. We don’t really know. But many who have used the shooting to bolster their arguments about terrorism fail to see that some of our soldiers have been damaged by our continued wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere. We deny the moral injury of a young man raised on American values and the good life thrown into a killing machine requiring the search for “terrorists” while killing many innocent Iraqis. Although some are able to live with the facts of what we euphemistically call “collateral damage,” killing civilians torment others.
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Some believe that Saddam Hussein was a thug, and the United States saved the people of Iraq from his rule. But afterwards, we killed and wounded over a million Iraqis and left a power vacuum filled by ethnic strife, and later, ISIS. Others bought the lie about the reason for the invasion and claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, even though Iraq had no connection to 9/11. The latest data indicates that approximately 20 veterans commit suicide each day. There are nearly two million veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but most are from Iraq. The most recent data show that veterans represent 18 percent of all the suicides for 2014, though veterans represent about 9 percent of the population.
Thirteen years after invading Iraq, the consensus is that the invasion was an error. Whether the error was intentional or not, Iraq suffered more than a quarter of a million dead, a million wounded, and the destruction of infrastructure, education, economy and medical services. If this were murder, the culprit (and in this case the president of the United States) would be convicted either of murder if it was premeditated or manslaughter if it were not. Many around the world have called it a war crime.
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