The Bush administration is in desperate need of warm bodies these days. Young people are dying, enlistment is down, and many of the troops in Iraq are either on their third tour of duty, or on involuntary extension—in spite of the fact that, in the case of many reservist, the military has stopped paying the families they left at home. As a result, the administration is putting out commercials portraying the glamorous and exciting life to be had in the military. But unfortunately, they’re subjecting our young people to the old bait and switch. They’re showing soldiers in nice, crisp, uniforms, sitting in what looks like computer rooms with everyone playing video games, instead of the very probable truth--lying out in the desert in 125 degree heat, thousands of miles from home, blind, and with a leg or arm blown off. That is the reality of military life under the Bush administration. This administration proclaims to anyone who will listen that they honor and respect our troops, but as the old folks use to say, “that dog don’t hunt”, and there is ample evidence of that fact on the public record. At this point, for example, the administration finds it expedient to deny that during the run up to war in Iraq they told the American people that Saddam Hussein represented an imminent threat to the United States. Now that weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq, they want us to forget the urgency in which they rushed us into this war. But if what they now say is indeed the case, and Saddam didn’t represent an imminent threat, why did the administration needlessly sacrifice the lives of our troops by sending them to war without the necessary protective gear? If Saddam wasn’t an imminent threat, it would have been in the best interest of our troops to wait until we had all our ducks in a row before we went to war—or at least until we had the necessary equipment. But the Bush administration had other priorities. They had priorities that superceded the welfare of our troops—the need to go to war before the American people had the time to think about what we were getting in to. Our young people were sent to war with vehicles they had to armor plate themselves, with scrap metal they’d found along the road. In addition, the families of many soldiers had to scrape up the money themselves to buy protective gear for their love ones--and if that wasn’t bad enough, it took an act of congress to get the administration to reimburse these families for their expenses. So just think about it-- here we are, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, and the parents of the troops have to send their children the protective gear from home, to help them stay alive. Then, administration has the nerve to say they honor our troops. I don’t think so. Even the Crips have flack jackets—and their parents don’t have to send them from home. But nothing demonstrates the arrogance and the cavalier attitude of this administration towards our troops more clearly than remarks made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. While meeting with the troops at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, in response to one of the soldiers’ questions regarding inferior equipment, Rumsfeld responded, “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have.” And then, he went on to say, “And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored humvee and it can be blown up.” So in essence, Rumsfeld told the soldier, don’t worry about it, they can blow you up anyway—armor or no armor. That’s only a couple of many glaring contradictions in the behavior of an administration that claims to love, honor, and support our troops. While they’ve made a mantra of the claim that they honor our troops, their actions grossly belie their assertions—in fact, most of their policies with regard to our military seem to suggest that their only concern for our troops is in using them as human shields against the criticism of a very unpopular and pernicious agenda. Therefore, this administration would be content to "stay the course" in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries in perpetuity. And why not--they don’t have anything to loose and everything to gain. It’s not their children dying for this dubious campaign, yet the trough of their selected, and bid-protected corporations are overflowing from the swill of war. While our love ones are being blown apart, Haliburton—the company in which Vice President Cheney headed before coming into office—is enjoying unprecedented profits; and as our families are being scarred for life, the children of these chicken hawks are following in their parent’s footsteps--lying back in the lap of privilege and luxury, content to cheer the heroic "little people" from the lobby of exclusive tennis clubs. Then, they tell us that our attempts to end this war, and to get our children out of harms way, is un-American. Well, it seems to me that anyone who buys into that nonsense is not only a non-thinking person, but in point of fact, an absolute idiot. |
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