Things that make me sad.
Nov. 8th, 2007 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsTerry Sater, in an op-ed in the St Louis Post Dispatch, writes that while dissent is patriotic, any mention of our troops as less than perfect is "despicable." Uh huh. He quotes the maxim that "In war, truth is the first casualty." And then he goes on to say:
Would a terrible, murderous tyrant still be in power? Probably. But then, six years later, Kim Jong-il is still in North Korea. Robert Mugabe is still in Zimbabwe. We may wince at Gaddaffi's "new Libya," but it was his "Arabist identity movement" in the 1980s that laid the seeds of Darfur in Sudan, al-Bashir ignores or encourgaes it, and nobody cares. (Y'know what the national motto and anthem of Sudan are? "Victory is ours!" and "We are the Army of God," respectively. Charming.) Nobody's doing anything about Than Shwe. We've all "moved on", casually ignoring the ethnic cleansing of Burma. Nothing will happen to Musharraf, either, and we know he has nuclear weapons.
We would not have an active moral responsibility for the people of Iraq. We would not have taken that geas upon ourselves. We would not have thrown 3,800 men and women into a meat grinder, creating a butcher's bill so high that failing to fulfill it would be a national tragedy.
We broke Iraq. And even if Bartle Bull is correct, the price will have been so damned high we bankrupted ourselves both economically and morally before we were able to give it back, missing a few pieces, the glue weak and obvious.
Sorry, Mr. Sater. The troops are the troops. American soldiers have always done the best they can, and their moral worth must by necessity reflect that of their leadership. Their leadership deserves no accolades, will have no victories, will be remembered for no honors. Our troops deserved one thing better than all they have received above any other: they deserved a decent mission. They were not given one.
We have lost more than 3,800 of our brave men and women in Iraq. Can there be any doubt that with our arsenal of weapons and tactics, we could not have drastically reduced that number, but at the higher cost of more civilian casualties?I'm sorry, but Mr. Sater has forgotten two things: it was the murder of truth that got us into this war (I cannot harbor any illusion otherwise any longer), and that there our a few items in our arsenal we failed from the outset to employ, items that could have saved 3,800 American lives, as well as quite a few civilians: restraint, diplomacy, patience, and wisdom.
Would a terrible, murderous tyrant still be in power? Probably. But then, six years later, Kim Jong-il is still in North Korea. Robert Mugabe is still in Zimbabwe. We may wince at Gaddaffi's "new Libya," but it was his "Arabist identity movement" in the 1980s that laid the seeds of Darfur in Sudan, al-Bashir ignores or encourgaes it, and nobody cares. (Y'know what the national motto and anthem of Sudan are? "Victory is ours!" and "We are the Army of God," respectively. Charming.) Nobody's doing anything about Than Shwe. We've all "moved on", casually ignoring the ethnic cleansing of Burma. Nothing will happen to Musharraf, either, and we know he has nuclear weapons.
We would not have an active moral responsibility for the people of Iraq. We would not have taken that geas upon ourselves. We would not have thrown 3,800 men and women into a meat grinder, creating a butcher's bill so high that failing to fulfill it would be a national tragedy.
We broke Iraq. And even if Bartle Bull is correct, the price will have been so damned high we bankrupted ourselves both economically and morally before we were able to give it back, missing a few pieces, the glue weak and obvious.
Sorry, Mr. Sater. The troops are the troops. American soldiers have always done the best they can, and their moral worth must by necessity reflect that of their leadership. Their leadership deserves no accolades, will have no victories, will be remembered for no honors. Our troops deserved one thing better than all they have received above any other: they deserved a decent mission. They were not given one.
