We’ve heard the words “Support the troops” almost everyday since the war started. One of the main contexts in which you hear this powerful little phrase is in response to criticism of the war and plans to get troops home. This is probably the most irresponsible and harmful possible use of this phrase. When we say this, we are not saying it in support of troops at all but rather the continuation of the war. To truly support the troops, we need to first make the judgment about whether they are being necessarily put in harm’s way.

If you had a child that went into a war due to some false premises or bad intelligence, then you are in a situation where you must make this distinction about what “supporting” them means.  Do you support them by a) doing whatever you can do to get them out of harms way sooner or b) blindly keep them there and tell anyone who is criticizing plans to get troops out that they are not ’supporting’ your kids.
Unfortunately, option B is what you are doing if you use the phrase “Support the troops” to discourage criticism of the war. Let’s support the troops by helping them get out of harms way as soon as we can rather than trying to make ourselves look patriotic by shutting down discussions that can really help.

I’m tired of hearing claims that the Bush administration’s war has been victorious in keeping us safe because we haven’t had a single death in the US since 9/11. To me, this is just insulting to the Americans in Iraq. We’re celebrating the fact that we haven’t had any deaths on American soil when in fact we’ve let almost as many American’s die on the terrorist’s own land.

It’s really sad what we mean by ’safety’ in this context for those of us on American soil. ‘Safety’ is really just knowing that others (not you) will die to reduce the already very remote chance that you’ll ever get hit by an attack. And even that reduction in risk is questionable. By sending troops there, we’ve basically just relocated the target of attacks off our own soil.

How staunch supporters of the war can call the thousands of 9/11 deaths a tragedy and the thousands of troop deaths (plus tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths) a victory is beyond me. It’s amazing what we’ll convince ourselves of so that we can feel ’safe’.