Benton,

Great post. One of the questions to be asked of war supporters is, "How can you say you support the troops while you support this war?" Of course, most of these people are determined to believe whatever the administration tells them about the war, even though there has been revelation after revelation about the lies and manipulations used to get the country into the war. These people should turn themselves in for a couple of weeks of deFOXification.

There are people who do oppose the war and still express almost carte blanche support for the troops. You might even hear some of them thanking a serviceman for his service to the country and for defending our freedom. There really has not been a lot of opportunity for someone in the military to provide much service to the Country for decades. Most military activities have been much more about projecting power on be half of the interest a select few and not for the citizens of this country.

My support the troops, like yours, is extreme narrow: get them home quickly and in good health. I also admonish the troops to take a close look at what they are doing. 1st Lt. Ehren Watada has set a good example in this regard, and there are others as well. Many of the troops return from Iraq and Afghanistan bearing heavy burdens for their participation in this obscene war. You have to wonder what they think when the committee of idiots show up at the airports to greet them as heroes. My son has a friend who was deployed to Iraq. When he returned home, his friend was surprised and greatly annoyed by the people who would offer to pay for his meals to thank him for his "service." Sometimes he told them, "You don't even know what I did over there!" He has never told my son very much about it either.

Many of the Iraq veterans will be like the WWII pilot who, just after releasing his incinderary bombs over a residential area of Tokyo, look down to see a small Japanese boy looking up at his airplane. That image was seared in his mind, and many of the Iraq veterans have scene from the war playing over and over in their minds.

When the occupation of Iraq ends, it will most likely be due to the resistance that will have developed in the military. The resistance is already there and it cannot help but grow with the continued deterioration taking place, and with such results as the routing of the Iraqi forces when confronted by the Mahdi army in Basra this spring. There are organizations such as Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace who are working to help those who resist and educating others in the military. We need to be helping them anyway we can.

http://ivaw.org/wintersoldier

Too many Americans have fallen victim to the glorification of the military scam and the dumbed down version of patriotism. We all want to be associated with something that is grand and beyond reproach. And, there are always those who will seek to exploit this tendency to the hilt by constructing grand myths and symbols before which we are to bow and swear our allegiance. If this country ever becomes a great country, it will be because a significant number of Americans have rejected the facade constructed to deceive them and worked to do what was required to make it such.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/bender/bender15.html

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"And what is this liberty, whose very name makes the heart beat faster and shakes the world?" -- Frederic Bastiat

After having been married to two veterans of Vietnam, both of them "damaged" by the experience, I have to say that during the epoch, I supported the entire concept of the "domino effect" of communism. Maybe our perseverance did prevent the spread of communism, even though we withdrew from there. Consequently, I was very torn when I was anti-Iraqi Occupation. Supposedly, the "war" ended in 2003; since then we have been fighting the "natives" of their own country. It's not a war; it's an occupation and the residents are resisting our presence. There is no Douglas MacArthur in Iraq, for sure. (What happened to the Douglas MacArthur's of the world?) I feel (as I am an American Indian, partly, of origin) that if I were in the same situation as the Iraqis, I would be resisting, too. I told diplomats that this would happen before the war began in 2003, especially if we did not find weapons of mass destruction (which we didn't). I also told them two things must happen if we were not to buried diplomatically in the world before the war began:

We must find weapons of mass destruction
We must do something for the Palestinians

We neither found the weapons of mass destruction, nor did we do anything for the Palestinians; in fact, there is an on-going process of genocide by the Israelis in Palestinian Territories; therefore we have about 100 years to go before we recover, if we ever do, from the Iraqi debacle.