It’s not often that I point people to read an article at another site, but that is precisely what I am going to do today. What I am asking you to read is an essay by Julian Delasantellis which is published on The Asia Times website. It explains better than I can the insanity of the slogan “Support the Troops” and the mindset among many who continue to support this vain and stupid war. Here are a few excerpts to whet your appetite, but I urge you to read the essay in it’s entirety.
The most important question of the [CNN Democratic YouTube Deate] (more so than the questioner with apparent severe eye damage who asked whether Senator Barack Obama was really black or whether Senator Hillary Clinton was really a woman) came from John Cantees, from the state of West Virginia.
“My question is for Mike Gravel [US senator from Alaska from 1969-81, now seeking the Democratic nomination as the darkest horse in the field]. In one of the previous debates you said something along the lines of the entire deaths of Vietnam died in vain. How do you expect to win in a country where probably a pretty large chunk of the people voting disagree with that statement and might very well be offended by it? I’d like to know if you plan to defend that statement, or if you’re just going to flip-flop. Thanks.” […]
At first, Gravel tried to answer the young man’s question directly. “Our soldiers died in Vietnam in vain.” Then, in keeping with the quixotic nature of his campaign, he justified the above statement with this curious manner: “You can now, John, go to Hanoi and get a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream cone. That’s what you can do. And now we have most-favored-nation trade. What did all these people die for? What are they dying for right now in Iraq every single day? Let me tell you: there’s only one thing worse than a soldier dying in vain; it’s more soldiers dying in vain.” […]
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards, former North Carolina senator and the Democratic Party’s 2004 nominee for vice president, knew how to answer this question; with their fatter campaign war chests, they can probably afford better focus-group polling than the shoestring Gravel campaign.
Obama: “I never think that troops, like those who are coming out of The Citadel [the South Carolina military college that hosted the debate], who do their mission for their country are dying in vain.”
Edwards: “I don’t think any of our troops die in vain when they go and do the duty that’s been given to them by the commander-in-chief. No, I don’t think they died in vain.”
And in their responses, the prospect of a significant withdrawal of US forces from Iraq before 2009 grew ever fainter.
That’s just from the first page, yet it encapsulates the thrust of Delasantellis’ main theme. Psychologically, many Americans are trapped by the past, and our country’s collective failure to understand that past, which today is wrapped up in the inane and vague slogan “Support the Troops.” A slogan, by the way, which has never been about supporting the troops in Iraq at all, but merely about winning a war that we lost years ago in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Or, I should say, about negating the shame of losing that war in the minds of today’s war supporters.
As I said earlier, please read the whole essay by Delasantellis, who by the way, is an American.
