Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home Now!

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has pledged to start removing troops from Iraq--but not until 2010. In the meantime, the increasingly desperate right wing claims that because the surge is "working" (meaning there is slightly less violence), the war is justified and should continue until we "win" (and who knows what they meant by that?). To me, what's going on in Iraq is the same old same old, and the sooner it's stopped the better.

For an hour every Friday from 2003 to 2006 along with other war protestors, I held signs while standing on a Santa Fe, New Mexico street corner. One of my signs read "Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home Now". Nowadays even most right wingers agree that the Iraq invasion and occupation were illegal, and five years later it continues to be a political quagmire and a bottomless money pit for the United States. Someday-when they're no longer protected by their office-if there is a God, or at least a few genuine patriots, Bush/Cheney Inc. will be tried as war criminals.

According to the website icasualties.org, as of Memorial Day weekend 2008, 4081 American troops have been killed in Iraq, with approximately 29,000 wounded.Sourcewatch.org reports that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs had treated 20,638 Iraq veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder by 2006 and had a waiting list of hundreds of thousands of other psychologically damaged troops.

You could make a case for all the deaths and trauma to our troops if something was actually being accomplished. But it isn't. Simply stated, Iraq remains a war that was conceived under false pretenses and drags on today in a world far more dangerous than it was when it began. There are more terrorists than ever before, and thanks to Bush, Iraq has become a hotbed of terrorism, something it was not under Saddam's dictatorship. Contrary to what neocons continue to want you to believe, the war was not fought to preserve the freedoms of Americans. There is compelling evidence that it was really fought so that Bush Junior could prove to his dad, who had his own much briefer Iraq war, that he had the cojones to finish what Bush Senior started.

But supporting the troops is something quite different from supporting a preemptive, needless war. I've heard war enthusiasts state that "freedom isn't free", and that's true enough, but they never explain what protecting freedom has to do with the Iraq occupation because there simply isn't a logical connection. In fact, our freedoms are threatened more than ever because of the enemies the United States has made through this terrible carnage carried out by troops who are either misled into thinking that it's necessary or who realize that it's wrong but face courts martial if they oppose it. And while these soldiers are supposedly over there defending our freedoms, through the Patriot Act Bush has methodically siphoned away many of those freedoms that right wingers apparently believe they still have.

Some pro-Iraq war veterans claim that they became soldiers because they were patriotic and wanted to fight for their country, and not because it was the only job available to them. That may have been true in the past, but the reality is that since 2003, fewer and fewer qualified people have been joining the military and more ex-felons, physically handicapped, uneducated, older and other less desirable soldiers are being deployed. A piece by Steve Coll in the April 14, 2008 issue of "The New Yorker" entitled "Military Conflict" reported that in 2006, the Army, desperate to recruit new troops to fight in Iraq, granted 380 "moral waivers" to recruits with a criminal past. And as the war continues, fewer high school graduates are joining up. Add to that the exhausted troops sent on repeated tours of duty even if they are physically or psychologically damaged, or both. Anyone who has a choice in the matter and values his life as well as his country simply will not consider the military a career choice these days because there's an excellent chance that he will be forced to play a role in the tragic farce that is Iraq.

What does it all mean? That the troops desperately need our support, and most important, that they need us to save them from a conflict that, according to presidential candidate John McCain, could continue to spread its poison globally for a hundred years.