Two Thousand Dead

Many of us who lean to the left will be marking this occassion. As a veteran who has seen friends and colleagues sent to their final rest to the sound of taps (in fairness, never in wartime), my heart goes out to each of those who have fallen in Iraq and to their families and loved ones.

That holds particularly today, when for the first time, a majority of Americans said we shouldn't have gone to war in Iraq. We as a nation are seeing that we went to war under false pretenses. Plamegate, the outing of a CIA agent because her husband disagreed with Administration policy, is not the result of someone who is convinced of the rightness of their position. It's the actions of someone with something to hide - you don't shoot the messenger unless you are afraid of the message. Two thousand Americans have died due in part to the prevarications and deliberate actions of those who wanted to cover up the true story behind Iraq's nuclear weapons program - there wasn't one. We are due our outrage. We are due our anger. We are due our disgust with the administration, its lies and its abuses of power.

The men and women who fight in Iraq are due our respect. Those who have fallen, their families and loved ones are due our sincere gratitude and our compassion. The fifteen thousand men and women wounded and maimed by this war deserve treatment for their wounds for the rest of their lives and they deserve the title of hero.

Those who started the war, the ones with more pressing agendas or influential fathers, the ones who never sat in a Vietnamese prison wondering whether their next breath would be their last, they deserve our revilement. The ones whose daughters and sons are too valuable to give their lives or their time to their countries, those deserve our disgust. The syncophants, the blind followers of both parties who gave a megalomaniac absolute power to fight this war deserve unemployment at our hand. The failed leaders hiding behind a wall of cocksureness and secrecy deserve their place in history as architects of one of the United States's darkest times. The spinners and the deceivers who, without adequate explanation other than I said so, should be the ones far away from home fearing for their lives.

Men and women of the U. S. Armed Forces, I salute you and I support you the best way I know how: By writing to get you home as soon as possible and to hold the bastards who put you in harm's way for no good reason accountable. Far more than any yellow ribbon accompanying a Bush for President sticker on the back of an SUV, my position is one of direct support for you, not the flawed decisions and decision makers that put you in harm's way. Brothers in arms, I want you home. More suppport than that I can't give.