[GenuineRisk]

DTS and BR, I'm hopping in just because I like you both and I hate seeing you squabble-- especially since I think you both agree on the biggest point, which is that GW Bush is a horrible man and the Iraq war should never have been started.

I don't think we can really presume to know the reasons every person who joins the military joins it-- though I do know the lower and middle-class have not benefited from the booming economy-- this particular boom, thanks to GW and the Republican Congress's policies, has benefited only the rich. Some of the people there didn't join the military; they joined the National Guard and I think they really got bait-and-switched. But so what they do now? If they go AWOL they get jailed (and how does one manage to go AWOL when one is already in Iraq?). And I think people want to believe that their work means something, no matter what their work may be. Can you imagine what must be going on in the minds of the soldiers there who think all this is for nothing? I do think the military is a perfectly honorable profession-- and it has been hijacked by the Bush cabal into a perfectly dishonorable war.

BR, in all fairness, I don't think the Democratic Party's propensity to attract "lunatics" is why the military leans right. I think it leans right because the Democrats lost the appearance of capability in defense in the wake of Vietnam and the Republicans have been exceptionally good in the last 20 years at framing the arguments to their advantage in an assortment of areas, defense not the least among them. The fact that Rush Limbaugh gets broadcast to the military and Air America does not doesn't help, either (or so I read-- is that true? Do my tax dollars go to sending Limbaugh's show to our boys and girls in uniform? Oh, the humanity! The humanity! Seriously though, that really pisses me off...).

But DTS, that doesn't make the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis any less awful-- I think everyone agrees with you on that! You clearly were affected by Vietnam, as was every young man of your generation, I think (with the possible exception of GW). My stepmom is Cambodian by birth, and survived four years in a labor camp during Pol Pot's regime-- she has some interesting thoughts on America's handling of Vietnam, though she also passionately loves the country that took her in after she fled her homeland in the dead of night. But I still see Cambodia in her eyes.

I can't fathom how men could be so arrogant and hubristic as to do what this Administration did with Iraq-- used a horrific tragedy on our soil as an opportunity to dupe the public into supporting a badly planned, badly funded attack on a nation that had nothing to do with that tragedy, because they needed an excuse to go in there. And I wonder, do the souls of the soldiers dead there and the civilians killed ever haunt them? And I think not-- but they haunt me. But I can't hold the men and women who are the boots on the ground responsible. The ones who participated in Abu Girab (spelling?)- sure. The ones who raped the Iraqi child-- sure. But not the average soldier who is just trying to do his or her job. For them, I pray for a safe return home and for some sort of peace in the wake of the horrors they've seen.