Support the Troops

Here’s a clip & save for you, via Sharon Jumper at Kos. The next time righties claim that you can’t support the troops without supporting the “mission,” shove this in their faces–a blog post by a soldier serving in Iraq:

There are battles which need to be fought and there are battles which serve no good purpose. Afghanistan and Bin Laden lay forgotten as if they were discarded toys left by a spoiled child.

Iraq is the new frontier of poor foreign policy and poor planning. Even the soldiers can see it. Why do you think nobody is re-enlisting? They don’t want to keep leaving their families to go fight a loosing battle and to die for an empty promise. The promise that somehow staying in Iraq makes America safer.

We have created a martyr factory here, and we are beginning to wade through the next Vietnam. How wrong do you want to be before you close down shop and send the troops home? 2,000 dead? Is that wrong enough? How about 10,000?

There is a field back home at Ft. Stewart, Georgia. There a tree has been planted for each soldier who has been killed in Iraq. After we returned in 2003 there were only a few trees, now an entire side of the field is full of them. My sister asked where they would plant more now that the row was complete and sadly I replied, “we still have three more sides to fill.” Maybe then when we have enough names for a beautiful war memorial we can leave Iraq.

I know as surely as the sun comes up in the mornin’ that, if righties get hold of this, they will smear the sergeant ruthlessly. Soldiers exist to gratify rightie desire for vengeance, not to ask questions about what it is they are risking their lives for.

(Although vengeance isn’t the right word, since the blood lust to kill “ragheads” has spilled way over retribution for 9/11. The 9/11 terrorist attacks are more an excuse than a reason.)

We lefties are often accused of hating the military. One does bump into lefties with a knee-jerk antipathy to anyone wearing a uniform, as though the uniform obliterates the humanity of the soldier wearing it. This is a minority of the Left, IMO.

But the Right is no better. The Right sees the troops as props in their sociopolitical fantasy, in which omnipotent America assimilates the world, destroying not-American things like so much vermin. Soldiers who question the mission or complain about lack of armor or who harbor progressive political views or otherwise behave like autonomous human beings spoil the picture.

The Right’s trump card is, of course, that questioning the “mission” amounts to helping the enemy. You know they’re all set to blame us lefties if when the “mission” finally turns into a rout–as if the incompetence and blundering of the Bush Administration had nothing to do with it. It should go beyond saying that, considering the strength and military resources at our disposal in March 2003, it took some serious imbecility to fail. But never sell the Bush White House short …

The old slogan “ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do or die” might be applicable to soldiers about to enter a battle, but the fact is that citizens are supposed to reason why. That’s our duty. In the United States, citizens are not subjects who must be blindly loyal to a sovereign. The government is us; the government is the will of We, the People made manifest. Or, at least, that’s what it is supposed to be. When government operates in the dark and makes decisions that citizens are not supposed to question, it is a betrayal of everything America is supposed to be about.

Let me expand that — someone will argue that some functions of government, especially functions that involve intelligence and security, need to be covert. That’s true, and it’s acceptable as long as the ends serve the will of the people. What worries me is when government is no longer responding to the will of the people and is following its own ends, and uses “security” as an excuse to hide the evidence. That’s a problem. Even a rightie ought to be able to see that.

When a rightie puts “troops” and “duty” into the same sentence, it’s usually to point to the duty of the troops to follow orders and fight where their government tells them to fight. Lefties, on the other hand, think of the duty of citizens to honor the troops as fellow citizens, not robots. We have a duty to citizen-soldiers to ask them to risk their lives only when the need is dire and the nation is in peril.

But the people who blame the Left for failure are the same ones who shouted down any attempt an meaningful debate before the Iraq invasion. Having hustled We, the People into war on false pretenses, now they scream that opposition to the war is unpatriotic. Sorry; democracy doesn’t work that way.

A democratic government’s duty is to loyal to the people and faithfully carry out the will of the people. But the people have no duty to be blindly obedient to elected officials who act in opposition to their will.

According to a CBS poll released yesterday, 55 percent of American adults believe the invasion was a mistake and 59 percent think the U.S. should withdraw ASAP. It’s true that a majority of Americans supported the invasion in March 2003, but the only “debate” I recall amounted to White House surrogates screaming at television cameras that we have to invade now or risk destruction by Saddam Hussein’s mighty WMDs. The people may have consented to the war, but it was not an informed consent. And now that they are informed, they do not consent to staying “as long as it takes.”

Live by the hustle, die by the hustle.

Be sure to read the other soldiers’ blog posts linked at Kos. Very illuminating.