No Way To Show Support For The Troops
ABC News, for all of its right-wing slant of late, ran a feature last night that reminded me of when investigative journalism was the norm and not the exception. You can see it here. It runs a bit over eight minutes, and I’ll wait here while you go see it.
Now that you’re back, are you as outraged as I am? Please forward the link to this feature to everyone you know if you are.
I cannot fathom how dense that colonel must be, considering how long he froze (more than once!) while pondering what he could say in response to some probing questions without finding himself assigned to Bagram for patrol duty. It shouldn’t have to take much thought to admit that the military is screwing our soldiers. Not running a correct payroll system is bad enough, but to not work out a method of repayment that doesn’t put our soldiers’ families and their credit ratings in the trash while not even offering the courtesy of a notice of explanation borders on the - nay, IS! - outrageous. And then for this colonel to sit there and claim that “all the problems are being solved” and implying that further pursuit of the truth is thus unnecessary is an insult to the intelligence of a normal human being.
Is the current occupational government of the United States based on the Richard Pryor system - posing the obvious as a choice between what we’re being told by the Bush administration and “our lying eyes”? I don’t buy it. Plaster your Hummer with yellow ribbons until it’s tied around the Old Oak Tree and allow this abomination to continue without protest, and you aren’t suppporting the troops as you claim. In fact, not protesting only makes it worse, as the Bush administration will think that they got away with it like they did New Orleans.
The military personnel are not your slaves, nor your servants. They are your fellow citizens who deserve as much respect as you hog for yourself. More, even. I don’t care if you support the war or oppose it. I don’t care if you bow to the White House and pray five times a day or if you are ready to haul George and Uncle Dick to the Hague for trial, our nation has a contract with those who take up the task of being the force to defend the nation.
Whether or not they are actually being used in that manner, or if they are instead used as the high-class muscle men for Big Business as Gen. Smedley Butler - a two-time Medal of Honor winner and Marine Corps Commandant - once admitted to being in War Is A Racket, We, the People of the United States cannot abandon them to their fate because of where our government sends them to do as they are ordered. They surrender a great deal of their freedom in return for promises made to secure some kind of a future for themselves once their terms of indenture are completed, or if in the course of their service they become injured or killed. We are a nation without honor if we don’t fulfill those promises.
If we as a nation don’t fulfill those promises, then we as a nation deserve to suffer the eventual fate of the Imperial Rome that the neo-con-federates drool to emulate - watching as our servants abandon defenseless us to the barbarians, because they stand to lose nothing in allowing the hordes to pillage and much to gain in a large measure of cold revenge for being dissed by their “superiors” for so long.