Bring ‘Em On...Home

 

In honor of Veterans Day, let’s support our troops. Support ‘em by bringing ‘em home. You say something like that, and the common retort is that we have to keep ‘em in Iraq to finish what we started. They huff stuff in a way that presumes they are on the right course. That it is better to die than to deal with reality. Well, that it is better for soldiers to die than politicians to deal with reality.

Confucius said a man makes a second mistake by not admitting a first. That’s where the Bushies are stuck. They can’t make a good move until they admit that their IraqAttaq was a disastrous error. They certainly have grounds to make that admission, not having found any WMDs, having been caught in huge lies and pretense over the Saddam-Osama connection that never was, and now setting up American men and women as virtual sitting ducks in a shooting gallery for the world’s worst terrorists.

The generals and their string-pullers in Washington want us to hold tightly to the old saw that dying in uniform, regardless of the reason, is somehow heroic, which is frighteningly similar to the Palestinian view of martyrdom. Indeed, who could call it less than suicide to wear an American military uniform in the bloody triangle?

But we can’t just leave, insist some whose support for our troops falls short of immediate withdrawal. They say that if we do it will be a victory for Al Qaeda. Excuse me, but we misplayed this tragic game a long, long time ago, when we first backed Saddam, compromising our true democratic principles for miscreant geo-politics. And in fact, most people around the world would look upon us with considerable respect if we told the truth, finally, handed over the reins to the United Nations, and brought our brothers and sisters home from this corrupt mission.

I don’t expect the White House to do the right thing, which adds to the imperative that we find a new tenant next year. In the meantime, public pressure may force a mitigation of the hell our leaders have hatched. Already the polls are having some effect, causing a fracture among the top advisors, and stirring considerable angst among the Bush handlers, but such good news pales when we remember that more than 130,000 Americans are still mired in the godforsaken quicksand.

Military adventurism is never a good idea. It is always riven with deceit, driven by special interests for profit. President Eisenhower warned us against the military-industrial-complex almost a half-century ago. We still haven’t got it, so fathers and mothers, sons and daughters will continue to pay with their lives.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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