I am sooo tired of hearing the warhawks prattle on about how if we say anything that is not 100% in favor of the current administration's idiocy, that we will be hurting our troops' morale.
Morale? What morale?
Think of how you'd feel if you were packed onto a cargo plane and shipped to a godforsaken desert nine thousand miles away from home. Where you are to fight a war you never had a prayer of winning from the git-go against people who have been killing each other for more than a thousand years over which Caliph should be dancing on the head of a pin.
Where every other person you see on the street would happily kill you if he could get away with it. Where, every time you take a ride in your Humvee, there's a good chance some religious fanatic is willing to blow himself up to get you, or that there's an IED on the roadside with your name on it, and that you are protected by armor slightly more effective than Saran Wrap. That the National Guard guy riding next to you is somebody's grandfather.
That three thousand of your fellow servicemen and women have died in this burgeoning civil war you are refereeing, ten times that many have been wounded, many of them maimed and crippled, missing limbs, deaf, or blind.
That your tour of duty never ends because the military can't collect and train enough new cannon fodder to replace you. That most of the word hates you for being here, and that hundreds of thousands of the locals are dead since you arrived, more than a few by your hand.
It was me? My morale would be in the toilet. If I didn't think most of the citizens back home wanted nothing more that to shut this lunacy down and bring me home, I'd be really depressed.
So enough with the "It hurts troop morale to think the public doesn't support them." bullshit.
Fuck that.
And of course, our new Congress, the broom that we brought in for a clean sweep to end this war is girding their ball-less loins and buckling their belts over gutless bellies to bring forth a non-binding resolution!
How forthright of them! How brave! Harsh language to make the President feel bad. Colbert's wag of the finger. Ow, ow, stop!
About as useful as tits on a boar hog, that, and no way, no how what we hired them to do.
Oh, Steve, you have all the answers, do you? What would you do?
Easy. I was Congress, I'd look at my watch: Look, George, it's two o'clock. Let's say, by ... end of August, you have all the troops packed up and on their way home, hey? Or we shut off the money spigot that has been wasting the taxpayers' dollar on this brainlesss business, end of discussion, period.
All the rest of the rationalizations are just pouring more people and money down a bottomless rat hole. Surge? A surge is something that happens when you floor the accelerator on a Dodge Viper. Sending more people into harm's way isn't going to do jackshit except cost more lives.
Everybody with two neurons to spark at each other knows this. Shiites, Sunni, and Kurds aren't going to listen to the Crusaders this time, any more than they did last time.
Fuck it. Bring 'em home. We're coming up on five years into this mess. Bring 'em home.
4 comments:
so, steve, i'm confused: what's your position? -- LT
I dunno, at some point, you look around and know that H.L. Mencken was right, and it's depressing in the extreme. I used to think the American public was brighter than it got credit for -- I don't think so any more. Sure, the pendulum swings the other way -- Bush and company screwed up so bad so often that people finally noticed and voted hard enough to sting the party in power. But that the Democrats have been dithering like a bunch of old men trying to remember where they put their house keys is no help.
Somebody needs to do something. If they can't, then they should get the hell out of the way and call somebody who can.
Deposing the Monkey King (and his entire court; let's not forget them) is a grand idea. But how can it be done? Replacing one troop of monkeys with another hasn't worked: monkeys, after all, are just monkeys, and it's their nature to take the bananas away from other monkeys whenever they can, and without much regard for the banana plants much less the rest of the forest. As long as monkeys are in charge, I don't see that anything significant will change. And since the monkeys themselves make the rules (they're in charge of the zoo, if you will) they're not likely to share the bananas with the other animals.
Seriously, I do not see any legal way to solve our problems by working within the current system, as the very people who cause the problems are in charge of the system, and I think have amply demonstrated that they will in every case put their own interests ahead of the interests of the country (and the rest of the world) as a whole. Not a happy thought, I admit, and I hope I'm wrong about this.
Morale....take it from a veteran, morale is something that is non existant..it is a catch word that the powers that be love to throw around do to the fact that their morale is great lol...they are not taking casualties. I spent numerous years in the Army some in hot spots most in peace time and I never saw great morale in either theater....unless of course your talking about the 3% of dipshits who are lifers (the most irritating jock sniffers on earth)...those folks are different entities all together.
Whether or not we pull out is not even an issue now....the answer is "IT WILL NOT HAPPEN" we created a pandoras box and escaping it now will get a whole bunch of innocent folks massacred....but hey were good at that...I guess we didn't learn much from Saigon, April 30 1975.
Michael Blackgrave
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