Supporting Our Troops Over a Cliff
Sunday, June 4th, 2006 by billFrom NY Times
By Frank Rich
The sunlight was brilliant in New York City on Memorial Day weekend, and the sailors deposited in town by Fleet Week looked brilliant in it. Nothing, including the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Haditha, has shaken American affection for the troops. Nothing should. These men and women go to war so we can party on. Since 9/11, our government has asked no sacrifice of civilians other than longer waits at airline security. We’ve even been rewarded with a prize that past generations would have found as jaw-dropping as space travel: a wartime dividend in the form of tax cuts.
“It shocked me that the country was not mobilized for war,” said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who retired after his stint as a commander in Iraq and became an outspoken critic of Donald Rumsfeld. He told The Wall Street Journal that “it was almost surreal” that the only time some Americans “think about the war is when they decide what color magnet ribbon to put on the back of their car.”
Should we feel guilty? Yes. The sunshine of last weekend, splendid as it was for a cookout, could not eradicate the dark reality that we keep sending our troops into a quagmire. At Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day, the president read a poignant letter that First Lt. Mark Dooley, killed by a bomb last September in Ramadi, wrote to his parents. What Mr. Bush did not say was that now, nine months later, insurgents rule Ramadi. As he spoke at Arlington on Monday, the Pentagon was preparing to announce that 1,500 emergency reinforcements were being sent from Kuwait to Anbar province, home to Ramadi, Haditha and Falluja, to try to stanch the bleeding.
There is more than a little something wrong with this picture. The president reiterated his Plan for Victory in Iraq as recently as his appearance with Tony Blair on May 25: “As the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” He said then that the Iraqis were “taking more of the fight” and “more territory” and “more missions.” The State Department concurred: Iraqi security forces are participating in “more than 80 percent of operations.”
So let’s do the math. According to our own government, more Iraqis are standing up — some 263,000 at latest count. But we are not standing down. We are, instead, sending in more American troops. Where have we seen this shell game before?
There was another plan for victory, too, you may recall. On the third anniversary of the invasion, in March, the president celebrated the new strategy of “clear, hold and build” by citing the example of Tal Afar, “today a free city that gives reason for hope for a free Iraq.” Last month 17 people were killed by a suicide bomber in an outdoor market there. The Tal Afar mayor has told The Los Angeles Times it will be at least three years before Iraqi security forces can secure his city of 150,000 without American help. To clear, hold and build in, say, Baghdad, with its population of six million, we’d have to throw in countless more troops still.
“When you open up the strategy for victory, there’s nothing inside,” Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and Marine veteran, argued in a speech last month. What the White House has always had instead of a strategy for victory is a strategy for public relations. That, too, fell under siege over Memorial Day weekend.
Call the P.R. strategy “attack, clear and hold”: the administration attacks the credibility of reporters covering the war and tries to clear troubling Iraq images from American TV screens so that popular support might hold until a miracle happens on the ground. This plan first surfaced when the insurgency exploded in spring 2004: Ted Koppel was pilloried by White House surrogates for reading the names of the fallen on “Nightline” and Paul Wolfowitz told Congress that “a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors.”
Upon being told that 34 journalists had been killed in the war up to that point, Mr. Wolfowitz apologized, but the strategy was never rescinded. Mr. Bush routinely chastises the press for reporting on bombings rather than “success” stories like Tal Afar. His new top domestic policy adviser, Karl Zinsmeister, has called American war correspondents “whiny and appallingly soft,” and he declared last June that “our struggle in Iraq as warfare” was over except for “periodic flare-ups in isolated corners.” That’s the news the administration wants: the insurgency is always in its last throes. We’d realize that this prognosis was “basically accurate,” Dick Cheney has explained, if only the non-Fox press didn’t concentrate on car bombs in Baghdad.
Now more than 70 journalists have died in Iraq, more than in any modern war, including two members of a CBS News crew killed in the bombing that injured the correspondent Kimberly Dozier. This tragedy also took place on Memorial Day, which Ms. Dozier was honoring by trying to do one of those Iraq “good news” stories that the administration faults the press for ignoring: the story of an American soldier who, despite having been injured, was “fighting on in memory of those who have fallen,” as she had e-mailed colleagues. Once that good-news story died in the bombing, so, one imagines, did the administration strategy of pinning the bad news in Iraq on the reporters who risk their lives to hang in there. Or so, in the name of simple decency, we might hope.
Those reporters, at least, have the right to leave. Not so the troops. General Batiste’s observation about the “almost surreal” disconnect between the home front and the war is damningly true, even in Washington. As the violence in both Iraq and Afghanistan spiraled before and after Memorial Day, Congress kept its eye on its own ball. In a bipartisan display of honor among thieves, Democrats and Republicans banded together to decry the F.B.I. for searching the office of a Democratic congressman, William Jefferson, who had been accused of hiding $90,000 in questionable cash in his freezer. Even more ludicrously, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — a man who damaged our troops incalculably by countenancing an official policy of torture — finally threatened to resign on principle. The principle he was standing up for, however, was not the Geneva Conventions but the F.B.I.’s right to raid Mr. Jefferson’s office.
Contrast these clowns with J. W. Fulbright, a senator who convened hearings to challenge presidents from both parties during Vietnam, changing the nation’s course. The current Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, has proudly put on this month’s legislative agenda constitutional amendments to stop same-sex marriage and flag burning. “Right now people in this country are saying it’s O.K. to desecrate that flag and to burn it,” he said on Fox News last Sunday, though it’s not clear exactly who these traitors are. A Nexis search turns up only one semi-recent American flag-burning incident — by a drunk and apparently apolitical teenager in Mr. Frist’s home state, Tennessee, in 2005.
The marriage-amendment campaign will be kicked off tomorrow with a Rose Garden benediction by the president. Though the amendment has no chance of passing, Mr. Bush apparently still thinks, as he did in 2004, that gay-baiting remains just the diversion to distract from a war gone south.
So much for the troops. For all the politicians’ talk about honoring those who serve, Washington’s record is derelict: chronic shortages in body and Humvee armor; a back-door draft forcing troops with expired contracts into repeated deployments; inadequate postwar health care and veterans’ benefits. And that’s just the short list. Now a war without end is running off the rails and putting an undermanned army in still greater jeopardy. “Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy,” Nir Rosen, who has covered Iraq since the invasion, wrote in The Washington Post last weekend.
We can’t pretend we don’t know this is happening. It’s happening in broad daylight. We know that “as the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down” is fiction, not reality. We know from the Pentagon’s own report to Congress last week that attacks on Americans and Iraqis alike are at their highest since American commanders started keeping count in 2004. We know that even as coalition partners like Italy and South Korea bail out, we are planning an indefinite stay of undefined parameters: the 104-acre embassy complex rising in the Green Zone is the largest in the world, and the Decider himself has said that it’s up to “future presidents and future governments of Iraq” to decide our exit strategy.
Actually, the current government of Iraq already is. On Thursday the latest American-backed Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whom Mr. Bush is “proud to call” his “ally and friend,” invited open warfare on American forces by accusing them of conducting Haditha-like killing sprees against civilians as a “regular” phenomenon. If this is the ally and friend we are fighting for, a country that truly supports the troops has no choice but to start bringing them home.
We the american people should impeach bush right now and stop this insanity.
Hey idiot as regard to the last paragraph. If what he says is true then why is he in the wrong? I mean god forbid these guys love their country enough to speak out on injustises by the invaders. Is he right? Yes he is I know several people in Iraq, some basic ground troops, and a couple of special forces and they all say these things happen everywhere in Iraq and that it is like a turkey shoot some days. Especially for the corporate mercenaries with no-one regulating them.
Very well put. Let’s honour our troops by bringing them home ! This is not “1984″.
Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, British trained oncologist in Basra reports many families with multiple cancer victims from Depleted Uranium dust inhalation, and estimates that about 40% of the people surrounding Basra will get cancer. Its no wonder the Japanese convicted Bush of war crimes. go to vitaltruths.blogsource.com for full story
we have no businness being over there in the first place. Their war has been going on for centuries. Why should the u.s. interfer? (let them kill each other, and let the u.s. find other alternatives for oil!) “I love my country, but fear my government.”
This will go down in the history books as, “The War of Lies”. It began with the “weapons of mass deception” and has gone downhill since then.
Just as I used to wondered how the Germans could possibly have bought the blather that Hitler was spouting, now I wonder at the same gullibility from American’s regarding our own “Fearless Leader”.
To read some of the NeoCon words on the Yahoo discussion boards is enough to make me quite sick to my stomach.
Just stumbled upon this site via a link at another website. Just amazed to keep hearing the same impotent arguments coming from the left. The arguments are “impotent” because, when redressed and refuted, or at least nullified, there is no dismissal of the left-side’s position, neither is there a counter. Just a repeat of the same position that had been previously redressed.
This reminds me of other left-right debates: what is better known than the abortion positions. The left state abortion is a right, the other side states it is murder. Certain the right for one to preserve their life supercedes the right to privacy. Yet, the left never addresses the right’s position that a fetus is likely a living person, and abortion, therefore, is likely murder. The right to choose cannot be greater than the right to live.
The War on Terror is here. Bin Laden and his terrorist network declared war on the US long before 9/11. Ignoring terror groups, their supporters, did not work for us, just as ignoring Hitler did not work. Dealing with Saddam with sanctions did not work to weaken him or his resolve for mass murder weapons that he had shown a proclivity for using. Is none of that clear?
Dear Mr. Rich, My father, 35 yr vet. , told me this. There is only one millitary in the world. Humans are a managed lot. All wars are economic and engineered for the last ten thousand years. The job of politicians is to make the wars look real, to the human herd. I could not even read the whole artical knowing the whole phoney war thing is purely to destroy our troops. I can only think this is to make America defenceless. Americans who still hold our constitution meaningfull need to address the horrific abuses of power we are sadly experiencing. I call upon all Constitution Defending Police and Millitary to defend your citizenry from well funded treason and tyrany.
The soldiers who murdered Iraqi civilians at Haditha will probably be given medals of honor.
These neo-cons started a war on lies which spiraled out-of-control, they tap EVERYONE’S phones, force book outlets like Amazon to stop selling the novel “America Deceived” by E.A. Blayre III, silence Ernst Zundel, and cage protestors. Is it any wonder, the troops have gone insane?
Last link before Google Books falls in line:
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-38523-0
Mr. Rich,
An interesting and thought provoking article however I must take exception with a sentence in the first paragraph, “Since 9/11, our government has asked no sacrifice of civilians other than longer waits at airline security.”
On the contrary, our government may have not asked the citizenry to “sacrifice”, however we are all paying a very, very dear price for our countries countinued transformation into a neofascist state. Unfortunately, most in this country are too busy watching American Idol or baseball to care.
Also, the last paragraph, where you speak about Haditha as if it was an isolated incident, is a gross misjudgement and frankly you give our troops too much credit. Haditha is likely the tip of the iceberg, as was what little information made available about the torture (not abuse as the mainstream media would prefer the public to call it) which took place at Abu Gharib.
I have several friends who went to Iraq as good people but can now be only described as sociopathic upon their return. Programmed…
President Bush is a traitor and the Congress of the United States is complicit in his treason for failing to write a Bill of Impeachment naming the President for his
unconstitutional, illegal act of declaring war against a state that had not attacked America.
Frank, Americans are so intoxicated by their own power they can’t see straight anymore. This is your war. You created it and you made the case for it. Then quickly shifted the reasons for it around some and your war profiteers are making a killing in blood money.
It’s JFK and Pearl Harbor put together. No matter which way you turn the truth is still gonna be looking at you in the face, you wanted this war, so stop whining like a little child. OK! Do the 99.9 thing, ya know killing with honor, freedom hook, superman , super hero soldier show. I guess most people realize they’re chasing shadows, but hope springs eternal! The day just might arrive when American’s come out of the self induced coma and decide killing mommies Iraqi baby so you can build billion dollar oil clubs and use Iraq as a springboard just isn’t the smart way to start peace or freedom. It’s a no-brainer.
Do you want it all or nothing? That’s the 7 trillion dollar question.
Ah, Mr.Rich, scion of New York, intellectual scold, and neo-con apologist tells us what’s wrong with the picture having spent almost five years banging the war drum.
Forgive me if I laugh.
America has long ago been sold out to the cronies of Mr. Rich- we were never intended to “fight terrorism” or “install democracy” but to kill America in order to pave the way for a globalist plantation.
Torture? Mass murder? DU poisoning? Stripping away of fundamental rights at the cost of eternal poverty and economic failure? The destruction of western civilization?
That was the plan.
It worked.
Unfortunately it gets worse. They have no care but to start a war with Iran, the reports are that more troops have been mobilized by the Decider already last year, and the battle groups are being put in place as we speak. The only thing they dont have is a good reason. And that they are trying to provide thru some contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident or a false flag attack by the goons on the innocent. The Neocons are facing investigations, defections, infighting and worldwide marginalization. They need and I mean need a terror attack bad so they can come out and stop it all. That is the plan anyways, will it work? I doubt it but they are giving a lot of dead bodies to the cause. And are you kidding me there is still somebody calling this a righty VS lefty thing? Labels are a shell game to divide people and obfuscate the truth. Like the phony balony Bin Laden videos, timed perfectly for propaganda purposes, this is getting so transparent and old. Please stick a fork in it its dead.
Well, Frank, I like your stuff and your style. And I was pretty much with you until the last paragraph. But what if al-Maliki is right? Have you looked at some of the other posts today on True Blue? You’d especially better check out the one from The Guardian reporters. The grand “strategery” of our action in iraq appears to be to out-crazy the crazies. Simple. Unpredictable. No messy rules needed. And why bother trying to tell “combatants” from “non-combatants”? Those devious “hajis” are just trying to fake us out anyway, mixing together like that. Why not just kill them all? Most of them must be having “insurgent” thoughts at the very least. Why wait ’til they act on them? That was the “logic” for the whole invasion wasn’t it? As for the ones who are “good”, who are “friend”, we’ve already excused collatoral damage to the “greater good”. Oh yeah, weep weep, cry cry for the papers and the cameras for a minute then issue some stern reminders to the “troops”. I mean, unless, you want to go further. Break rank. Say the invasion and its prosecution is a crime and crimes committed in the furtherance of a crime, well, hard to see how that doesn’t come up snake eyes, Frank. But there is a way out of this ethical “pickle”. Outlaw ethics! Hah, hah, just kidding. No, like I said. Why not simply follow-through with our first intention, our gut instinct? Give the “troops” an open-ended order (hey, neat, also right in line with the symmetry of the everlasting “war on terror”) to open fire on anyone and everyone regardless of circumstances. Can’t get much crazier than that, can we? And then, blessed relief. The slate of iraq wiped clean of all its people. So we can get down to what we really came for. Haven’t forgotten that, have you, Frank? Sometimes I forget who you write for.
Symmetry, Frank. I predict it will prove to be a bitch. And then, some sunny day, in the not-too-distant future, when a few “shocked and awed” vets show up to kick the soccer ball around with the neighborhood kids, we might just want to check and make sure they’re using a real soccer ball.
Not forgetting that the Iraqi government also recently declared its support for Iranian Nuclear ambitions. As well they might, since Iran has not broken and is not breaking the terms of its NPT membership. Unlike the USA which has trashed the NPT.
Personally I found that news as encouraging as it is amusing. That the USA for all its lying, fraud and belligerance, has not even got any control over its own puppet government in Iraq.
This situation is absolutely a more farcical and surreal one than we ever expected to see in our lifetimes.
I suggest americans start to learn a couple of words in Russian and maybe Chinese for good measure “Mercy please” and “I am a friend”. Maybe “take what you want but please leave my family in peace”?
……… ask the Iraqis what words work best for them when hostile foreign troops break into their homes.
Since the USA is financing its adventures with money borrowed in essence from countries like China and others, it could be argued that the USA is being deliberately assisted to its own doom.
It was always said the USA would sell their executioner the rope to hang them with.
The surreal part is that instead the USA borrowed the money to buy the rope to hang itself.
The ultimate irony is even deeper, that Boxcutter 9-11, which provided the emotional engine for this whole imperial shitstorm, was itself a Neocon-engineered false-flag inside job.
Read David Ray Griffin’s books (carefully please).
Yes, Emery so true.
The whole thing is like I said surreal.
911 self inflicted = NO justification for anything.
NO justification for Iraq attacks = War Crime.
US threats against Iran = Oil Profits for Iran.
guess what kiddies Congressman Charles Rangel just snuck in a Mandatory Draft Bill anybody 18 to 42 will have to serve a term of 2 years in defense of this country.Congress is set to covene on 6/6/06
to vote on it. There is no goverment anymore it is totally infested with people from big business who’s only loyalty is money. There god is money there virtues are bought with money. WE THE PEOPLE need to stand up to them but will we? no not until it hits us directly in the face kinda like Hurricane Katrina and the damage has been done. I work at wal-mart and i deal with people everyday people are so oblivious to whats around them some days i have to pull out stuff being unloaded from trucks with pallet jacks and more often than not what im pulling out is freakin heavy and hard for me to slow down once i get going and people will just stand right in my way stareing at me like a deer caught in your headlights at night. Then they move at the last moment sometimes! If people dont start to wake up and do something about these tyrants then what ever happens is what they deserve. It doesnt matter who you vote for anymore, there is no voting for the lesser of two evils because evil is evil no matter how one looks at it. Just about all religions have a story of an endtime and it looks like where about to go through a very bad time with the US preparing to invade iran which might just pull russia and china into it and if the decider chooses to attack them he needs to be taken out of office for the better of the world or we may be acting out Armageddon ourselves.
Scary isnt it.
Coming from Australia, a token member of the coalition of the willing, i am amused by the predicament of said coalition. I can see bush kneck deep in his own …, blairs getting snuffed out too. But our howard, in co-operation with a domestic media monopoly, unlimited asio powers, and an almost destroyed opposition, still walks around loving his own lies. no-one has even thought to wipe his nose in some of his own … at least the uk and usa have some level of debate!
The New York Times: too little, too late. No remorse for the relentless spate of articles beating the drums of war frenzy in cahoots with the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Perle/Rice/Card/Rove/ad nauseum war machine. Oh those wonderful Judith Miller leads stoking the blood thirst of the sheeple. Mendicent palaver from the desk of lying cowards. The rough beast slouches towards America; its iron fist poised to strike. Only look in the mirror: Haditha is not a pretty reflection.
The reasons for going to war are more than I will relay here but one is obvious. Corporate greed! Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and George H. W.’s Carlyle Group are making a fortune while Jr. depletes our treasury from the Washington end. Let’s face it, it’s just a bunch of Mafioso type corporate crooks, under orders from demonic forces related to the Vatican white Pope, his black Pope boss (Jesuits) the Masonic Illuminati bankers and their royal friends. Ask yourself, who owns all the war weapon companies raking in the dough? The Queen of England and her hubby Prince Philip have been making a lot of IED’s and chemtrails, among the rest of their inventories. Sadam is said to be a partner with Bush in a missle making company like the ones we rained upon innocent peoples in two bullshit wars now. Another reason is blackmail. Because all these people are gay and/or pedophiles they have left this country open to blackmails and it is said that Sadam intended to divulge these truths, as Iran is now prepared to do. An underlying reason is that Sadam changed the money puchases of oil from dollars to euros about a year before we went to war. Now Iran, Venezuela and Russia are heading into this exact direction. Is’nt it strange that they become enemies as they attempt to do so? If you are rich with dollars, does’nt it make sense to protect the trillions you have stashed? All the leaders of all the countries, multinational corporations, royal families and religious organizations are all in bed with each other, sort of speak, and their God is satan. Their agenda is depopulation and/or incarceration of all those who disagree with their new world order they have been cooking up for centuries. They have poisoned our minds with their foods, fluoridated water, microwave cellphones, scaler weapons and other devious methods. They hide technologies far ahead of what we know and use them to influence our every move. They intend to rob you then eliminate you if they can’t use you for their deviant pleasures. How many children and adults dissapear daily all over the world? Where do you suppose they go? How many people die everyday from diseases which our medical system never finds cures for? Why does our so called journalistic media only parrot what their corporate ownership allows? Why does every religion profess to be the one truth yet we have so many? Could it be, divide and conquer? Why do our leaders make laws favoring the corporatists over their constituents? Could there be some bribery going on? I could go on forever with real questions but I’ll give you a break because I realize that people have been dumbed down and don’t read much. Please realize this, we are surrounded in Iraq by patriots of that country who know what is going on. We need to get our sons and daughters home before this insane administration uses them all and then some for cannon fodder and turns this country into Mexico II. Please wake up people! Shout out to all that can hear, I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore! If you don’t, well get on the bus. They are building the camps now but when you get there, it won’t be a picnic!
First off, why in the hell should Americans support the troops ! ? The vicious bastards are killing women and children, torturing their POW’s and in the quiet of the night,,,, fucking them in the butt.
hy should we respect that ?
I do not support the trops, they are as evil as bastards in the Vietnam war.
As for What the American people and what we can do about this…. NOTHING !
Our tax dollars do not pay for this war, it is financed by credit extended by international bankers, and the war is being fought mostly by mercinary, and green card troops.
Could we march in the streets.. to stop the war? If we did it will not even be covered by the controlled press !
And if we did get traction by public demonstrations,, our leaders would dissappear, or there would be a terrorist attack,, blamed on the anit war demonstrators,, and the police would come and send us all to jail.
The long and the short of it all,, is we the people ain’t in charge anymore.
I’ve been saying it for years…It will take mass protests, millions of people on the streets in cities across America, for our rush toward fascism to stop. By the time people are finally outraged to that extent, it will probably be too late. The Bush team (or their successors) will declare martial law and arrest people trying to exercise their rights to public assembly. The majority who were too absorbed by TV pabulum and video games will be caught unaware when the economy collapses and our country is consumed by anarchy. I’ll bet you’re saying it can’t happen in America. I said the same thing, the first time I read Orwell’s 1984.
A kid in his twenties told me recently: “The way the government is now, we just have to accept it”. This is why America is in the state it’s in. We’ve got a lot of old right-wingers that say it’s for the good of the country, and young people that have been brainwashed by propaganda. We need a grass-roots movement that will stand up against the government, a social revolution similar to the 1960’s era.
What’s going on here,bill? Do we need to let the Guinness people know?
I’ve seen photos of flashmobs,been a victim of flashfloods, but this is the first time, considering average numbers of responses per post, I’ve witnessed a case of flashblogging, or perhaps more accurately, flashcommenting.
Congratulations, and grease the link,comrade.
Donot worry my friends. The day is soon coming when ALL and I mean EVERYTHING, the reasons for the manufactured Mid-East crises , 911 and those who planned them and how. Solid evidence, 100% cannot refute proof. Treason, my friends. Donot be afraid for the illusion is about to come down right on top of them. Truth is what these evil and twisted individuals fear, more than power itself! Many people in government that are under close watch and have been kept silent under the “national security” posters, as a reminder to keep the perpetrators under a blanket of protection, they who have a conscience know what is at stake. It is their families not just yours that they fear for.
Even Hayden can’t keep these people from saving America from their death grip.
How can I support the troops when the actions taken place in Iraq for the past 16 years by them and our so-called leaders is right out of the pit of hell. The country of Iraq is a dead zone with radoactive particles covering every square inch, the ground water poisoned, everybody infected with DU, babies deformed…..all for oil.
Ask yourself this question,….what would Jesus do? Does he support the troops and their mission? Not a chance. Why should we.
George W. Bush may be the most ignorant man ever to hold the office of president. There have been plenty of crooks, for sure, but George seems to be a notch above the average crook – he’s in-your-face ignorant and mildly illiterate, to boot. How Texas survived his tenure is beyond me, and apparently a salute to the quality of Texans in general. There is still time to vote Libertarian. lpo.org.
It will take Christ Jesus Himself to get us out of this mess Bush has gotten us into.
this world is now in the last stages….these lies,illusions,fakeouts and secret motives are now what we live. If only people would look with thier mind and eyes unclouded by hate, power and money they would see…..if disney cartoons can paint a true story filled with opinions and hidden messages masked by animated character for you to see, and disney is considered kiddy why cant we as young adults and adults see the writting on the wall. I will never understand how the self proclaimed gifted and great people of america are being openly decieved and mislead…..its kinda pityful, and the funny thing is if america can do this to everyone else what makes the comming attacks on americans by americans inconcieveable?
Friends,
The issue is simple. Liberty is one thing you cannot have unless you are willing to support it for others. The United States has been engaged in simple act of Breaking and Entering in the sovereign nations of Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly 4 years.
We are not required to “support” the troops. Only those who support this Legalalized Plunder in those countries are going to support such actions.
Legal Plunder is merely confiscation of another’s property by the Government. It is an action performed by government – that could not be legally executed by a private citizen.
Were I to do to my neighbor – what our troops are obliged to do in Iraq – I would be repelled forcefully by my neighbor or captured, tried and punished for it – by the government.
Unfortunately – our troops are now so devoid of sense or conscience – they all comply with the madness. The are in a very pathetic position. However – they are responsible for their choices and their actions.
Our Creator is observing and their just desserts await them.
Most of them are completely irradiated with Depleted Uranium and their just desserts will see fruition in due course. Provided of course some of those pesky “neighbors” – you know the men who are fighting back there in Iraq – don’t deliver them first!
Get it thru your thick Heads! Bush and his Administration are not RIGHTWINGERS … they are socialists/Globalists/elitists … Real Rightwingers tend be Nationalists … these folks ain’t nationalists.
Break out the TINFOIL HATS guys and girls….
Silly liberals, you’ll fight tooth and nail to abort as many babies as you can but remove a Dictator and his rapist sons with the US military….OH that’s not right!!
Idiots like Frank Rich should sit down and shut up, let the men do the good work…
I would have used tactical nukes a year ago to end the war and then maybe that Iranian moron would shut his trap too.
Nuclear war is going to be fun. I just know it will be.
Or… maybe not…
It is time to reinstute the DRAFT!!!
The free ride is over. The NY Times journalists will probably finance anyone who wants to desert the US. Canada will protect all American Deserters so they can be free in an Islamic state.
Are America’s children ripe for the picking?
Cheney thinks so. Now get it together, take a deep breath MMMM.. exhale..Ahhhhhhhh
your in the army now
Your in the army now
a son-of-a-bitch
making men rich
Your in the army nowww.
Now that you’ve all had some practice with your video games , it’s time for you pussies to taste the real thing. And the army is gonna make real men out of you. Just like Bush.
Go get’em hero’s. Save the world.
If it was up to Johnny USA, the world would be smoldering ruin. Hey Johnny, “support the troops” magnets just went on sale half-price at 7-11. Hurry and go pick one up along with your twelve pack of guts.
There we are…America is for 40 years+ already
the proxy of world zionism..the american people
were cooked into this Iraqi war by the satanic stench of wolofowitz/perle/tenet/rove and co. and the willing jerks called cheney/powell/ rumsfeld/rice and the super idiot called bush were willing to sqander so far 2500 american lifes, 18000 wounde soldiers.. killing a 100000 iraqi lifes also designed collaterals, a poisening 300billion us$ + counting… shouldn´t the american people ask the american rifle association to shoot the above mentioned bastards in the street…Ceaucesu style… Tsunami with no mercy to the american people, that had let it happen, that these satanic zionists could get onto the the bone marrow and ruin them as they try to do so the whole humanity and be it bee sting like every day with trash such as flooding the world with porn out of the San jOaquin Valley, the once beautiful California…God bless the cursed nation of America…
It is a great surprise to most Canadians that Americans are just recently beginning to wake up to the reality of their government’s lies and war on humanity. Canadians have been aware of the oximoron of American Freedom and Democracy since “The Ugly American” and “A Nation of Sheep” were published back in the fifties.
Unfortunately, we now have a Prime Minister who has decided that George Dub-yah is king and has thrown in our lot with that moron. I guess that our close proximity to the United States of Agression has rubbed off on us by osmosis. We now are no longer a nation devoted to Peace keeping and have become the agressors in America’s War for Oil.
Thank you for your truthful article. I served in the military for 23 years and I used to be a republican, a democrat and an independent! I’m none of those now. I also used to think I knew something of US and World History. Boy did public school mis-inform me.
For those of you who naively see Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or any other war in the past two centuries as a noble struggle for freedom or worse yet, as a left-right issue, wake up! It doesn’t matter which whore is in office they simply do the bidding of the elitist international bankers, plain and simple. Money and power baby!
This present conflict, like countless before, is about money. Where in the world are we getting the billions (trillions) of war dollars that we’re spending, WHO will get richer from the interest, and WHO will have to pay the price? Our country is on the brink of being third world with Mexican influx, MASSIVE hidden inflation that will soon BUST (Russia and China are even now dumping our dollars for gold–up again!), we have an increasing, insane police state, and do you really think this is AN ACCIDENT? Again, WAKE UP! We are being dumbed down, destabilized and destroyed right before our own eyes. It ain’t about GW friends. He’s just one of the criminals.
We watch while our poor young men and women, who know no better, are sent off to do a duty none of them understand in circumstances that are IMPOSSIBLE by the very men who shirked military duty themselves. At the very same time, these whores in DC are trying to erode and/or eliminate the few veterans benefits and health care services available already while voting for pay raises for themselves. DID you know tomorrow the HOUSE debates a new selective service bill that would induct ALL americans from ages 18 to 42 to two years of service? Congressman Rangel of NY did that. Wake up!
Folks, there are not enough light poles in Washington to hang these traitors. Again I say wake up and get educated, and do something if it’s not too late already.
John Patriot
This war will be the last war. There wont be a person to record the history of it. We have sat back, we will pay. Russia and china will come down on us with the rest of the world. we would be shot down in the streets if we protested. Well Ill see you all in the streets when are troops are lining us up to get on the busses to take us to the camps already being made.
Even if we revolt, they will use the troops who said they would shoot americans if told to ( there is a survey which asks the troops that) and bring them here, and right when we fight back… BOOM Russia china and the rest of the world crash on us. It is our own incompitance that has led us to this, dont be fooled. Might be about that time to start praying, Maybe someone might listen.
Very good website,it was my frist time and
It’ll not be the last…very good job.
Mimo
http://www.st911.org
http://www.infowars.com
http://www.prisonplanet.com
http://www.tomflocco.com
http://www.stevewebb.com
http://www.rense.com
First thing Harper said to Bush, “You want me to swallow?”
Bring the troops home, and use them to expel illegals.
Protect our own borders and let the rest of world take care of it self.
Rense and the links posted, especially including tom flocco’s, are CIA run BS
After reading some of these posts: “Fuck these troops, they’re volunteers, they knew what they were getting into, good for them, too bad they didn’t get it worse, I hope they lose both arms and legs and are sitting in a wheelchair near busy traffic so I can hurl bricks at them and ridicule them, etc…” Can’t blame them for shooting. If I were blamed for my political leaders’ fuck-ups and were ordered to shoot at the “grateful American people” I might actually enjoy it.