FIASCO

July 24, 2006

So, “the article I linked to yesterday”:http://www.thudfactor.com/wordpress/2006/07/23/unwilling-to-listen/ about the Iraq war appears to be an excerpt from the upcoming book “_FIASCO_”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/159420103X/celticknotwor-20 by Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks. Thomas Ricks did an “online chat”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/07/07/DI2006070701061.html where he discussed his book and his articles. As you can probably guess, a few nutjobs crawled out of the woodwork to accuse Ricks of lying and demoralizing the troops:

bq. … I congratulate you on being the typical cynical, pessimistic, liberal Washington Post reporter that the rest of this country looks down on as somethign wholely un-American and frankly I just can’t say enough about morale-destroying you probably are to our troops. I’m glad my WWII-era military father is gone so he wouldn’t have to pick up the Post in the morning and see your trash on the front page of the paper.

No one has yet been able to explain to me why the most powerful, best equipped, and best-trained military needs us to _clap real hard_ for them to win. They are our United States Armed Forces, not Tinkerbell. If their morale can’t withstand criticism of Don Rumsfeld or the Generals in charge, then we have all sorely misjudged them.

Likewise, I still don’t understand why “supporting our troops” means supporting the President’s policies and ignoring the consequences. Exercising the civilian citizen’s right to oversee the activities of the government to ensure that our military resources are used intellegently and that our troops continue to be well-equipped and well-trained for the tasks they are asked to do seems much more supportive. As does calling for a withdrawl of troops or, at the very least a radical shift in military planning, when it becomes clear that our armed services do not have the resources they need to do the job properly.

In some people’s strange little heads, supporting the troops means cheering for the President when he sends them into battle undermanned and underequipped without clear goals or the training needed to accomplish the mission — and pointing out the realities of the situation is tantamount to being a traitorous fifth column.

That doesn’t sound like useful support. It doesn’t even sound like democracy.

Posted in Politics