Stumble it!A message for all you yellow-ribbon people
posted in War by themaiden |Supporting the troops means more than just playing cheerleader. It means adequately training the troops, adequately supplying them, adequately arming them, adequately staffing the war-zone, and in general it means not running running your war like an idiot. Supporting the troops means letting the people who know what they are doing, do what they know how to do. And it means keeping the ideological lunatics out of the loop, and out of the way. In short, supporting the troops means not running a war the Bush Team way.
But there is something else too. Supporting the troops means adequately– hell, more than adequately– taking care of the individual soldiers after the fighting is over. The Bush Team has failed on this score too. As “an Old Peace Chick” at Blondesense points out:
The VA estimates that nearly 200,000-300,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. What’s alarming is that veterans of the Iraq War are already arriving in homeless shelters, victims of PTSD, substance abuse, divorce, unemployment.
And furthermore…
Being a female, a nurturer, I can’t even begin to describe how it grieves me that our sons and daughters who enlist to protect and defend our country are sent off to invade and occupy a soveriegn nation, taught to torture and ordered to kill families, probably many just like their own families at home. Not only that, they were rushed to war without adequate armor and protection under phony pretenses. When they arrive back in the states, they exist not even knowing if they will be shipped back to the war zone, stressing their families and of course themselves. They are hidden from society. They are not given a voice in the press. I’m sorry, but when I see the faces of the fallen soldiers on television each week, I choke up and I cry. Many of them are just kids. Have you seen their baby faces? Then there are men up to 50 years old, probably dads, reservists, husbands, doing their civic duty, leaving their families, who are probably strugggling. How many tours of duty have they served I wonder. The least our leaders can do is be honest with us.
The rest of the article is every bit as fabulous, and it includes a jab at the media’s role in the vilification of veterans, and another jab at the Bush Team’s rather ridiculous suggestion that we fight terror by going shopping.
But now to the yellow ribbons mentioned in the title of this post: Those damned ribbons never meant “Support the Troops”. Those ribbons meant, and mean, “I support the NeoCon Bastards who use US troops to settle personal vendettas and make a bit a coin in the process.” Those ribbons mean “Go! Bush! Go! And God-damn the troops!” Those ribbons mean “Make that Money Run Like Honey on Your Tongue!” Those ribbons mean you don’t give a damn about the troops. Those ribbons are not about the troops. They indicate support for a group of politicians whose concern for the troops is roughly equivalent the concern some racing dog owners have for their greyhounds– run them into the ground then to hell with them. That makes me very angry.
I am not anti-war, though by today’s return-to-barbarianism standards it may seem like I am. I realize that armed conflict is sometimes necessary, and that will likely remain true for some many years until our arrival in the Utopian Future. I do believe, though, that the decision to go to war requires extraordinary justification. There are wars in our past that I think were justified, and there are places in the world where our soldiers could actually do some good. Iraq is not one of those places, and it never was. Still, the soldiers sent to fight that war did so in the nation’s name and deserve decent treatment for that sacrifice, regardless of the justifications for the war.
Popularity: 4%
