Homestead mailing list

[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Reading this writer's position of not being supportive of our troops in 
Iraq is more than unsettling. It stopped me dead in my intellectual and 
emotional tracks. I've had an uneasy feeling for a long time that this is 
an issue that needs airing. I consider that supporting the troops means 
supporting an unnecessary and stupid invasion that I disagreed with from 
the git-go. But then I think about all the young, usually poor, kids who 
have been duped into enlisting by clever recruiters. I think about the kids 
doing what they see as their duty and those following a proud family 
tradition. And I think about the needless deaths on both sides of the issues.

Life used to be much simpler.


Joel Stein:
Warriors and wusses

I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to 
have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper 
stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin 
is unwilling to urinate on.

I'm sure I'd like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. 
If you're wandering into a recruiter's office and signing up for eight 
years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.

And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who were for the Iraq 
war — supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, 
then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and 
bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.

But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support 
the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — 
and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away 
from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national 
interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.

Blindly lending support to our soldiers, I fear, will keep them overseas 
longer by giving soft acquiescence to the hawks who sent them there — and 
who might one day want to send them somewhere else. Trust me, a guy who 
thought 50.7% was a mandate isn't going to pick up on the subtleties of a 
parade for just service in an unjust war. He's going to be looking for 
funnel cake.

Besides, those little yellow ribbons aren't really for the troops. They 
need body armor, shorter stays and a USO show by the cast of "Laguna Beach."

The real purpose of those ribbons is to ease some of the guilt we feel for 
voting to send them to war and then making absolutely no sacrifices other 
than enduring two Wolf Blitzer shows a day. Though there should be a ribbon 
for that.

I understand the guilt. We know we're sending recruits to do our dirty 
work, and we want to seem grateful.

After we've decided that we made a mistake, we don't want to blame the 
soldiers who were ordered to fight. Or even our representatives, who were 
deceived by false intelligence. And certainly not ourselves, who failed to 
object to a war we barely understood.

But blaming the president is a little too easy. The truth is that people 
who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following 
orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be 
inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying. 
An army of people ignoring their morality, by the way, is also Jack 
Abramoff's pet name for the House of Representatives.

I do sympathize with people who joined up to protect our country, 
especially after 9/11, and were tricked into fighting in Iraq. I get mad 
when I'm tricked into clicking on a pop-up ad, so I can only imagine how 
they feel.

But when you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're 
not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada. So you're 
willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism, for 
better or worse. Sometimes you get lucky and get to fight ethnic genocide 
in Kosovo, but other times it's Vietnam.

And sometimes, for reasons I don't understand, you get to just hang out in 
Germany.

I know this is all easy to say for a guy who grew up with money, did well 
in school and hasn't so much as served on jury duty for his country. But 
it's really not that easy to say because anyone remotely affiliated with 
the military could easily beat me up, and I'm listed in the phone book.

I'm not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after 
the Vietnam War, but we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something 
we don't think was a good idea. All I'm asking is that we give our 
returning soldiers what they need: hospitals, pensions, mental health and a 
safe, immediate return. But, please, no parades.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-stein24jan24,0,4137172.column?coll=la-news-comment-opinions