Troop Supporter
©2005 UrbisMedia
“Supporting the Troops” has become axiomatic in the discourse on the war in Iraq. This mantra is our prime Viet Nam legacy. No matter how you feel about the justification for the conflict, in the end, one is compelled to add, like an “amen,” but “we (I) support the troops.” The more demonstrative on that matter festoon their trucks and SUVs with appropriate stickers and, of course, yellow ribbons.
Support for the troops was brought to the fore of my attention today by an unsolicited (I suppose with an pass on the “don’t call” list) phone call asking me to, yup, support the veterans – and this is a clever stratagem, since one may have different feelings about WWII than the war in Iraq – with a donation to this new organization. I declined, shutting off the caller’s next prepared supplication to my sense of patriotism or guilt. I should say that as a matter of practice I don’t give money to anybody who calls me unbidden.
I did give a curt explication of my refusal: George Bush has cut veterans benefits, combat pay, makes soldiers pay for their food in hospitals, and puts more of them in hospitals by not providing adequate body and other armor. Plus , I “gave at the office” last April 15 and I’m getting ready to do it again, paying for a war I oppose. Now, some organization wants be to ante up again because my other money has been spent on fattening Cheney’s Haliburton stock, and killing a lot of people. Have they called Rumsfeld, who has already surreptitiously purloined funds from future veteran’s benefits and will make Bush’s request for another 80 million or so seem more exigent.
No thanks. I hung up.
But I am getting off of my main point about supporting the troops. Frankly, I don’t support allof the troops. I don’t support the troops who were shoving broomsticks up detainees at Abu Ghraib and beating up detainees in prisons in Afghanistan and Guantanamo; I don’t support the troops who opened fire on a hotel full of journalists in Baghdad, and who have killed eleven journalists and recently wounded an Italian journalist and killed the man who arranged her release from captivity, claiming little more that “ooops”; I don’t support the trooper I heard on a documentary gleefully boasting about “wasting some ragheads”; and I don’t support their officers who give lying explanations for these abusive, stupid and incompetent practices. I don’t wish any of these jerks, and there are too many more like them, any harm; but support them? I don’t support the idiot in camouflage who told a newsman that he is keeping terrorists off the streets of America. No thanks.
I do support Jessica Lynch, who came forward and explained that the Pentagon had fictitiously made her into a combination of Sergeant York and Wonder Woman when in fact she was a casualty of incompetence and probably was saved by an Iraqi doctor. I support the troops who exposed the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. I support the troops who are reluctantly over there patching up the wounds of any and all casualties of this misguided war. I support the troops who have the courage to speak up and say what’s wrong with the war and the way it is being conducted.
In a recently published book by Anatol Leiven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism Oxford University Press, 2005, the author argues that the Bush administration blew a significant opportunity after 9-11 by not concentrating just on the terrorists and at the same time enlisting Islamic nations in the same effort. Instead, the pre-packaged neo-conservative “mission” was adopted and America abetted the recruitment efforts of bin Laden with its clumsy and brutal “bring ‘em on” militarism .
I mention this book at this point not gratuitously, but because there is plenty of support I would give to our troops in a just mission. If you need an example there was a recent poll in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, that determined that positive attitudes towards the United States went from a low of 14 percent to over 60 percent because of the aid that American troops brought to tsunami victims and their communities. (And Bush had to be pushed to expand the paltry 350 million he initially offered for relief, and his new budget cuts the already parsimonious American foreign aid from its munificent .018 percent.) I support those troops and that mission (it “accomplished” something).
But a yellow ribbon decal on my car? No thanks.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 3.7.2005)