Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home Now!

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has pledged to start removing troops from Iraq--but not until 2010. In the meantime, the increasingly desperate right wing claims that because the surge is "working" (meaning there is slightly less violence), the war is justified and should continue until we "win" (and who knows what they meant by that?). To me, what's going on in Iraq is the same old same old, and the sooner it's stopped the better.

For an hour every Friday from 2003 to 2006 along with other war protestors, I held signs while standing on a Santa Fe, New Mexico street corner. One of my signs read "Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home Now". Nowadays even most right wingers agree that the Iraq invasion and occupation were illegal, and five years later it continues to be a political quagmire and a bottomless money pit for the United States. Someday-when they're no longer protected by their office-if there is a God, or at least a few genuine patriots, Bush/Cheney Inc. will be tried as war criminals.

According to the website icasualties.org, as of Memorial Day weekend 2008, 4081 American troops have been killed in Iraq, with approximately 29,000 wounded.Sourcewatch.org reports that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs had treated 20,638 Iraq veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder by 2006 and had a waiting list of hundreds of thousands of other psychologically damaged troops.

You could make a case for all the deaths and trauma to our troops if something was actually being accomplished. But it isn't. Simply stated, Iraq remains a war that was conceived under false pretenses and drags on today in a world far more dangerous than it was when it began. There are more terrorists than ever before, and thanks to Bush, Iraq has become a hotbed of terrorism, something it was not under Saddam's dictatorship. Contrary to what neocons continue to want you to believe, the war was not fought to preserve the freedoms of Americans. There is compelling evidence that it was really fought so that Bush Junior could prove to his dad, who had his own much briefer Iraq war, that he had the cojones to finish what Bush Senior started.