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Friday, March 23. 2007
HAPPY ANNIVERSARY
We are now into the fifth year of Bush’s war in Iraq. Over 3,200 American service men and women killed, thousands wounded and thousands more who will suffer some type of psychological impairment as a result of this war, and what have we got to show for it? An escalation… err, I mean surge … that doesn’t seem to end! We get nothing but bullshit from the president and his administration.They’ve screwed the veterans of this and every other war, the men and women fighting Bush’s war still don’t have all the equipment that could keep them safe, like the Cougar armored personnel carrier that actually protects troops from those horrific IED blasts.
“Retreat? Hell!”
The 2-5 in Iraq
The 2-5 in Iraq
Well, there is one combat brigade full-equipped and ready to fight, but it’s stationed on the DMZ between North and South Korea. I’m guessing we want to leave them there.
Bush’s National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley, was on This Week with George Stephanopolous, spewing the same old rhetoric the White House has been regurgitating week-after-week for the past four years: “… gives General Petraeus and the men and women in uniform the funding they need and the flexibility they need to get the job done.”
How long will this carnage go on? Another four years? Bush and his minions want us to believe the strategy is working; that putting our troops into the middle of the Iraqi civil war is making a permanent difference.
There’s a certain justice to that in a twisted way. Our president started this civil war when he sent our troops in invade Iraq, based on lies and a misshapen neocon view of how to convert the rest of the world to American-style “democracy,” where the dollar is God and the name of Jesus a tool for political manipulation.
The twisted part of that logic though is our troops are paying the real price for the neocon disaster. There’s a mindset, that of those suffering from PTSD and/or severe depression and anxiety, that the lucky ones are soldiers and Marines who didn’t leave Iraq alive; “Why am I alive?” a constant, sometimes hourly question that crawls through every crack of our thoughts to take over every conscious moment and consume us with its subsequent fears and self-loathing. If you know someone like this, whether he or she was in the current horror or past, you probably don’t understand why someone would feel that way. Those who died won’t have to spend the rest of their lives living with the constant and terrifying memories that stop you dead in your tracks, all thought replaced by the brutal re-enactments of the horrors witnessed; be they last year or 30 years ago.
The worst that will happen to Bush is that he will go down in American history as the worst president ever. The arrogant fucker even had the gall to tell everyone he has no problem sleeping at night.
But what happens when the U.S. troops pull out? Will they ever pull out? The only reason the violence has subsided is because our troops are there, but despite the reduction in violence, Americans are still dying at the rate of three-per-day. Is that acceptable?
On top of that, the Iraqis are now using children as decoys. Thursday bombers used a car bomb with children in it, a ruse to get past checkpoints as if the adults were taking the kids to school, and then blew up the car with the children in it. Gee, that sounds like things are getting better.
On Hardball yesterday, Chris Matthews was interviewing two representatives, California Democrat Ellen Tauscher and Virginia Republican Eric Cantor. Matthews played hardball with both, but Cantor refused to answer the simple question; was it constitutionally correct for the president to get his war authorization from Congress in 2002. Actually it is the Constitutional way to declare war, but with Bush’s stabs at having a dictatorship, the Republicans — most of them anyway — are reaching for sound bites to justify the current version of “Stay-The-Course.”Bush has ensured that the Veterans Administration will be under-staffed and under-funded for decades to come. He and his minions didn’t prepare for this war they shouldn’t have started in the first place and I’m goddam tired of hearing sanctimonious a-holes like Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who once had the admiration of many, telling us we shouldn’t be looking back to place blame because we need to look forward to solutions for the problems; the reality is, he and those using that bit of rhetoric know that once the people start holding the politicians accountable, their fat will be in that fire as well.
Happy Anniversary.
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