Indeed, the bipartisan beltway bickering of our political leaders over the merits of the troop surge plays out like a tragic, corrupt farce when set against Iraq's catastrophic reality. "The violence in Iraq is overshadowing a humanitarian crisis, with eight million Iraqis-nearly one in three-in need of emergency aid," concludes a July report from Oxfam International and a network of aid organizations working in Iraq. Currently, 70 percent of Iraqis are without adequate water supplies, up 20 percent from 2003. Twenty-eight percent of children are malnourished, up from 19 percent before the invasion. Fifteen percent of the population regularly cannot buy enough food. Fifty percent unemployment continues to stalk many areas of the country.
Among U.S. troops the casualties now number over 3,800 dead and 29,000 wounded. More than 185,000 returning veterans have sought medical and disability assistance for post-traumatic stress and other injuries. And the Bush Administration's only answer is more of the same. No wonder also that like the public at large, many U.S. troops increasingly question the war. A Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll taken in 2006, for example, found 72 percent of U.S. troops serving in Iraq supported an exit from the country within a year. Only one in five favored the President's "stay the course" rhetoric.
The Iraq war proves that the world's biggest military budget and imperialist hubris alone guarantee nothing, lest of all justice. But instead of tempering their course, the White House response now is to stoke the rhetorical fires for further lighting up the region with a possible military assault on Iran. Not for George Bush is any Thoreauean twaddle about the life of quiet desperation. The modus operandi of this administration is that it must always be someone else who goes to their graves with the song still in them.
"In public life today, paying homage to those in uniform has become obligatory and the one unforgivable sin is to be found guilty of failing to 'support the troops,'" writes Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich in his 2005 book, "The New American Militarism." As the military power nonpareil, the United States under its current leaders is on a path that "invites endless war and the ever-deepening militarization of U.S. policy," warns the former career military officer from Normal, Illinois.
It's a path that for the first time openly embraces the option of "preventive war" as policy. With this has come a revival of the mystifying nonsense that every troop deployment is driven by the goal of "protecting our freedom" as Americans. What better way to justify a war that don't deserve justification than to elevate "the troops" onto some sanctified stage where critical thinking is sacrificed to a cartoon version of patriotism engineered by desperate, violent men.
As usual, it's the rank and file soldiers who are the pawns in this deadly game.
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