Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

"The man went into Iraq without justification, without a plan; he just decided to go in there and win, and he had no idea what was going to happen. There have been terrible deaths on our side, and it's even worse for the Iraqi population. It's another Vietnam." -- Mary MacNeely, Mother of Air Force Reservist

Vietnam, which ruptured this country in incalculable ways. Among them, a right/left split that moved most military and military families to kneejerk Republican allegiance. Speaking as a member of one of those few left-leaning military families, let me say that I have seen this this coming; this Republican loss of its reliable military voter base.

Families with ties to the military, long a reliable source of support for wartime presidents, disapprove of President Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq, with a majority concluding the invasion was not worth it, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

The views of the military community, which includes active-duty service members, veterans and their family members, mirror those of the overall adult population, a sign that the strong military endorsement that the administration often pointed to has dwindled in the war's fifth year.

The Bush Administration's obsessive pursuit of "victory" in Iraq has not only managed to destroy its own support from military culture, but that of its party.

When military families were asked which party could be trusted to do a better job of handling issues related to them, respondents divided almost evenly: 39% said Democrats and 35% chose Republicans. The general population feels similarly: 39% for Democrats and 31% for Republicans.

The Progressive Democrat Newsletter grew out of the frustration of the 2004 election. Having organized protests against the Republican Convention, I found I had a core of activists who were looking to me for support after Bush "won" re-"election". My carefully thought out suggestions as to where we could go from that defeat led to this more-or-less weekly newsletter.

This week I discuss a very personal conflict with Homeland Security. Yes...my wife is at the center of a battle for our Civil Liberties and my diary about that on Culture Kitchen went platinum with WELL over 12,000 reads in one week. I also cover recent Republican attacks on our troops, Rudy Giuliani's campaigns disguting exploitation of 9/11, and I put out a personal appeal to you to help us here in NYC take one more Congressional seat: NY-13.

Appearing at The Jaundiced Eye, the Independent Bloggers' Alliance, and My Left Wing.

Frederick W. Kagan



Glenn Greenwald, whose forthcoming book is on the meaningless chest-thumping of chicken-hawk culture, offers the following illustration. He quotes Fred W. Kagan, whose argument against Jim Webb's proposal for allowing our troops more time at home between deployments, is that it will be a bureaucratic nightmare.

So this amendment would actually require the Army and Marine Corps staffs to keep track of how long every individual servicemember had spent in either Iraq or Afghanistan, how long they had been at home, how long the unit that they were now in had spent deployed, and how long it had been home...

During General David Petraeus' reports to Congress, we learned that former Sunni insurgents have begun fighting on our side in Iraq. Sunday, I came across a London Times article that states:

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."~~Dante

Okay.  Let's talk about troops.  Everybody's doing it.  We're bombarded round-the-clock with "support the troops...fund the troops...bring the troops home...surge the troops...use the troops for Commander Guy photo opps..."  Congress is embroiled in a ghoulish "troop" food fight that has gone on far too long.  Democrats say Republicans demoralize and dishonor the troops by sending them into an unwinnable war built on lies.  Republicans counter that, by suggesting the war is lost, Democrats demoralize and dishonor the troops by calling them "losers."  

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers' Alliance.

I could feel a huge concussion wave,

and then I couldn't hear anything.

I told my sergeants my ears were hurting

and that I felt really weird.

My vision was acting all strange.

-- Spc. Paul Thurman

Paul Thurman was not supposed to be deployed. His brain had been damaged before he even left Ft. Bragg; a training accident in which a log was dropped on his head. Brain scans showed evidence of lesions. Yet, inexplicably, he was sent to Iraq. There he sustained a second head trauma; another training accident. An IED  simulator went off three feet from his head.

Someone needs to tell Peter Pace that the U S Military is not the arbiter of moral behavior. He's not the only one who makes this mistake. My husband informs me that many of his fellow Marines are of the opinion that the UCMJ is a tract on morality. It is not.

Peter Pace says he doesn't want the military to change its policies on homosexuality because it is "immoral." He likens it to adultery, which is prohibited under the UCMJ.

"As an individual, I would not want (acceptance of gay behavior) to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else's wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior," Pace was quoted as saying.

Will the Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief never tire of hiding behind our troops? Follow the pretzel logic if you will. We must attack Iran in order to "protect our troops."

At Rice's Senate appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a pursuit. "Obviously, the President isn't going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq," Rice said, adding, "I do think that everyone will understand that--the American people and I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is necessary to protect our forces."

That's right. We must set Iran on fire, while our troops are sitting ducks in Iraq, in order to protect them. We must exhaust what's left of our military supplies and hardware in order to protect them.  I fail to see how destroying our military readiness protects the troops or the country, for that matter.

The New York Daily News is one of a handful of news venues to pick up on a key revelation in the New Yorker's recent profile of "24". The show was approached by military and FBI leaders, who asked them to stop glorifying torture.

The grossly graphic torture scenes in Fox's highly rated series "24" are encouraging abuses in Iraq, a brigadier general and three top military and FBI interrogators claim.

The four flew to Los Angeles in November to meet with the staff of the show. They said it is hurting efforts to train recruits in effective interrogation techniques and is damaging the image of the U.S. around the world, according The New Yorker.

"I'd like them to stop," Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the magazine.

Finnegan and others told the show's creative team that the torture depicted in "24" never works in real life, and by airing such scenes, they're encouraging military personnel to act illegally.

Multimillion dollar cold war style weaponry; absolutely. Body armor and working equipment for our troops; not so much.

Ralph Peters's recent column in the New York Post (or here) lays bare the anatomy of the very "military industrial complex" that a tough old soldier known as Ike warned us about many years ago. Writes Peters:

Our ground forces are being driven hard, with many soldiers and Marines already on their third assignments to Iraq or Afghanistan. Overwhelmingly, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps do the bleeding and dying. And even as we're able to gradually reduce our troop levels in Iraq, the need for robust land forces to cope with other looming crises is indisputable.

Yet, instead of beefing up the forces that do the actual fighting, the Pentagon self-justification process known as the "Quadrennial Defense Review," or QDR, is about to call for increasing the buy of the F/A-22, a pointless air-to-air fighter with a $280-million-per-copy price tag, while acquiring high-tech destroyers designed to defeat a vanished Soviet navy.

"Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency... [Islamic insurgents]are united against U.S. forces, and we have become a catalyst for violence...It's time to bring [our troops]home..." -- Rep. John Murtha, (D-Pa.)

Is it really? I certainly wish it was. I very much want it to be. But is it time for the troops to come home? After thoroughly ****ing up Iraq, injecting ourselves into a country which arguably (but most likely) wants nothing more than to be left free of Western influences and meddling, and then squatting down in their country for what appears to be "the long haul," is it time to leave?

DON'T serve them a cardboard
cut-out turkey...!

i spent two thanksgiving and two christmas holidays eating in a mess hall in vietnam... the mess sergeants really tried to make it home-like and festive but, somehow, eating your holiday dinner in a war zone in a uniform just doesn't quite cut it... the best support we could possibly give those men and women serving in iraq is to make sure they get home without any more of them having to die...

http://takeitpersonally.blo gspot.com/2005/11/how-not-t o-support-troops-on.html