|
communities have literally held bake sales to properly outfit them with life-saving protection, that is supporting the troops.
Somehow, it is unpatriotic blasphemy to complain that Americans are being kept, for the first time ever, from seeing the caskets of their fallen soldiers returning to American soil at Dover Air Force Base. But leaving the injured ones to rot in squalid conditions at Walter Reed and elsewhere (haven't they given enough yet, Mr. Bush?) is supporting the troops.
Somehow, it's okay for the president to run around the world talking about the importance of freedom, as if he had the faintest clue. While at home his administration has been intimidating and silencing these very same injured soldiers, threatening them if they talk to the press. All in the name of supporting them, of course.
Somehow, the administration can question the patriotism of Congress when it contemplates conditioning war appropriations with requirements that the troops be adequately trained, equipped and rested. But the same administration 'supports' those troops by denying and delaying disability benefits to injured veterans in order to help maintain the public lie about the fiscal costs of the war.
Somehow, believing that the burdens of national security - not to mention the momentous policy of invading and occupying another country - ought to be shared by all Americans through a military draft is some kind of socialist plot. But sending Guard and Reserve troops who were never intended for this sort of deployment into three, four and five rotations, not relieving them with regular military draftees, and sticking them alongside highly paid no-bid contractor mercenaries who comprise nearly half the forces on site, that is supporting the troops.
Somehow, criticizing the administration for torturing, humiliating and murdering POWS in hell-holes like Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, while trashing the Geneva Conventions as "obsolete" and "quaint", is being soft on terrorism. But the president was supporting the troops when he said of five Americans captured early in the war, "We expect them to be treated humanely, just like we'll treat any prisoners of theirs that we capture humanely". God help American soldiers if they are treated the way we've treated theirs.
Somehow, caring for the wounded returning from Iraq represents some sort of vaguely liberal anti-American project that 'compassionate conservatives' (the oxymoron of the century) find all too suspect. But returning them to the battlefield, as this administration is now doing, even before they've recovered from their wounds is a fine case of supporting the troops.
And somehow, arguing that the Iraq war was a ridiculous and tragic diversion from the campaign against al Qaeda only betrays the naiveté of the fools - including former high officials in the Reagan, Bush and even Bush Junior administrations - dumb enough to make such comments. (We either fight them over there or we fight them here, you know.) But creating international chaos, global antipathy toward the United States and legions of angry new terrorists today, whom our soldiers can expect to have to face in battle tomorrow, is supporting the troops.
In what insane world, in what Kafka novel, in what twisted Dali painting, does this litany of Bush administration shame represent supporting the troops? How much Coulter Kool-Aid do you have to drink to believe that sending American forces off to die for a lie is defined as supporting them, while trying to save them from dying for that lie is undermining them? How many Limbaugh Lies do you have to hear before you think that trashing Geneva, overtaxing vulnerable Guard and Reserve forces to avoid a draft, sending injured soldiers back into battle, delaying and denying the meager benefits due to the wounded, and housing them with cockroaches represents support for the troops?
With all due respect to American troops (whose commander-in-chief has shown them none of the respect they're due, whatsoever), you'd have to be either insane or desperate to join the military today. Which precisely explains why people aren't doing so anymore. And which also precisely explains why standards have been lowered in recent years in order to meet recruitment targets for the Army and Marines. Low IQ? Never been to high school? Serious criminal record? No problem. There's a home for you in George W. Bush's military. They'll start you off at the rank of Cannon Fodder, First Class, and you'll see exciting action right away on a romantic desert battlefield. And even though you've never spent a day in high school, the military will send you to college when you return. If you return. And if you can survive the compassionate care Mr. Bush has lined up for you at Walter Reed.
From the lies surrounding the Spanish-American War to those behind the Vietnam War to those of the absurd manly Republican adventures in Grenada and Panama, America has too often squandered the lives of its youth for the sport of presidents. And from the Bonus Army to Agent Orange to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to the Gulf War Syndrome, America has far too frequently abused them a second time, despite their willingness to answer the call.
Major General Smedley Butler (who knew firsthand whereof he spoke, having served, by his own assessment, as a high-ranked military lackey doing the dirty work for corporate robber-barons in Latin America) nailed it when he said,
|
|
