I wish you'd stop posing in front of soldiers. You stand in front of these brave young men and women who, as as friend of mine once said, marched down to a recruitment center at a strip mall and swore out an oath to the flag- as if this will somehow make you like them.
More and more, they aren’t looking prideful at all, or happy to see you. They look solemn, moribund, worried.
They aren’t smiling. You’re the only one smiling. And unfortunately many Americans are convinced that you actually flew that S3-B Viking on the deck of that carrier. There are those who are convinced this was all he right thing and we should carry it through as if we even could win something at this point. There are a few who still believe that you really care about them.
But all of the men and women who are bearing the brunt of this entire fiasco, you don’t deserve their loyalty.
You started a war. You thought you could win it quick and easy and on the cheap.
You were as wrong as it is possible to be wrong.
This is botched job, and most of the kids, and the officers from our graduate military academies, they all know this is a mess. This is just a long winded refusal to admit that you and your cronies and neo-cons have led us down a disasterous path that now, for the first time in centuries, leaves not on single battle ready brigade on US soil. You followed the lead of a group of men and women comprised of those who with few exceptions never actually served. John Waynes in Ted Bakers with martinis at posh Washington insider bars covered in dark smooth oak, cigars in hand, few of them actually ever knew the fear and blood and guts of actual combat. With their history books in one hand, their Davididoffs in the other, they prattled on about their summer internships at the AEI. And concocted an invasion into the Mideast that you, sir, bought hook line and sinker.
On average, more than two US military personnel die a day in Iraq. Yet you cut their benefits, stop loss people who joined just to get an education. Five to ten a day are wounded and you couldn’t name a one of them. The sheep like press that is mostly owned by big GOP owners and friends of yours obsequiously turn the cameras away from caskets at Dover Air Force base. A powerful propaganda network keeps Americans misinformed and in the dark while you continue with this grand scheme, a script as it were that only you and Dick Cheney and Condi knows the end of it. You know there was a number of Marines that died the day Anna Nicole Smith died but our lazy and increasingly irrelevant MSM networks hardly named them.
These brave kids who took you and your administration at your word that would care for them, you have given them nothing but bureaucracy and mold. You outsourced their care to companies that are more loyal to you and their shareholders than they are to the Armed Forces.
You don’t deserve their loyalty.
They are nothing but props to you. Many still believe in this fools errand of a mission. Many more believe that this is a civil war that you started not a liberation, and they know they will be stuck in this classic military quagmire.
All your ‘scholars’ at AEI and Cato Institute and whatnot can’t find the parts of their history books that record western armies marching into Mesopotamia and getting their asses handed to them with regularity.
But the kids paying the price in blood and broken marriages and permanent injuries, you don’t deserve their loyalty, sir.