I heard one of the members of the US House of Representatives claim the other day that Americans "can't support the troops without supporting the mission." He (his name and district escape me, I am sorry to say) made this remark as part of his argument against Congress passing even a non-binding resolution against Dubya's so-called troop surge in Iraq.
Say what? He has confused the fact that the troops, by and large, obey orders with the notion that they therefore agree with those orders. WRONG! Most US soldiers know that they have an obligation to disobey illegal orders . . . but they also know that they must obey legal, even if inadvisable, ones.
For heaven's sake, even Ollie North is saying that troops he's recently interviewed in Iraq are not sanguine about the "surge" being successful. This doesn't mean that those troops won't do everything they can to complete their mission. It does mean that they won't be overjoyed at having to try., since they know the deck is stacked against them.
Pouring more and more young Americans into the meat grinder that has become Iraq makes no sense to me, either. Especially when it's not an overwhelming number of troops who will come in all at once. A strategy like that might have a chance of succeeding. Measures implemented in dribbles and drabs, however, will not. They do not differ from letting a leaky faucet continue to drip. Each drop may not seem like a great loss, but when you get the multi-hundred dollar water bill, you'll wonder why the heck you didn't fix it sooner. Worse, the longer you let it go on, the worse the damage gets. We are destroying our own future at the behest of men (Dubya, Dick Cheney, etc.) who did everything they could to avoid real service when it would have been their time to go. What's wrong with that picture? If you don't know, you need to refresh your knowledge of American history.
What's worse, those in Congress who support Dubya seem to think that if we have debate and disagreement, we are hurting the morale of the troops already there. There's no logic in that assertion, either. It cannot hurt the morale of those we pay to protect our freedoms when we exercise those very freedoms. That's what they are there for. They know that.
What's going to hurt the morale of the troops is to find out that Dubya's proposed budget for the next fiscal year cuts programs and benefits to the Veteran's Administration and to the armed forces . . . and raises the co-pays our retired veterans and active duty members of the armed forces will have to pay for medical treatment and prescriptions. Not to mention not providing the troops fighting the war with proper equipment in the first place. [Yes, I am still shaking my head in disbelief at Donald Rumsfeld's assertion that you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. I say you don't go to war until you do have the army you want, especially when you are the one starting the war.--Ed]
Not that such fuzzy thinking is confined to members of our national government. I understand that the Bank of America is going to market credit cards in Los Angeles "to people who do not have Social Security numbers." Read that "to illegal immigrants." The Bank of America representatives who announced this program claim that BA will be serving an underserved market, that it will make BA lots of money because there's no competition for that market, and that they are doing nothing wrong. Since when did aiding and abetting illegal activity, like living in the US illegally,become "nothing wrong"?
Oh, well. It's not exactly as if fuzzy thinking is a brand new problem in American history. During the Salem witch trials, those who confessed to being witches were not harmed. Those who refused to confess were killed. Kind of reminds me of the statement of the US soldier in Vietnam who said, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." It also reminds me of the Rehnquist Supreme Court--a majority of so-called "strict constructionists" comprised the most judicially active Supreme Court in US history. It's just that their rulings favored conservative causes. I've noted before that people seem to think judicial behavior is the dreaded "activism" only if those people disagree with the consequences of the ruling.
Brrr . . .
I'm so cold from the exposure to all this fuzzy thinking that I am shivering.
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