McHypocrisy

From the start of the Iraq war whenever I got into a discussion, I won't call them arguments, with a war supporter we obviously never agreed. But the talk would always end with, "but you do support the troops don't you?" They'd tell me, "It's important to support the troops even if you don't support the war." They were parroting politicians, but I always had my suspicions that when Republican chickenhawks used the phrase it was code for, "don't criticize the war for the sake of the troops."

It was their way of blunting criticism with guilt. If you criticize what we're doing the troops will feel bad about their mission and you will be the cause of their failure. Now in retrospect, maybe it was me that undermined the entire war effort. Seriously, I never bought the argument, but I always felt that they meant what they said about supporting the troops. That any obvious lack of support for the needs of the people who put themselves in harms way to protect us would be seen as such hypocrisy it would beggar belief to the point it would undermine all the rest of their arguments.

That was before we found no weapons of mass destruction and no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. It was also before we found out that many troops didn't have body armor, or armored vehicles, and people were buying their own body armor and sending it to Iraq for family members serving there. Before Rumsfeld made the callous statement that we go to war with the army we have. And I could fill 100 blog posts with the billions in profits made by Halliburton and other contractors, friends of Dick Cheney's who failed to serve the needs of those who serve us. And then there are the stories of vets having to pay for their own phone calls from veterans hospitals that Barack Obama related in one of the Democratic debates. And stories of horrible conditions in veterans hospitals, and of homeless vets and the list goes on and on.

And now this, that John McCain, veteran and former POW, who claims to hate war, while he sounds the drumbeat for war with Iran, has not signed on to this bill that would correct some of the past lack of support for our troops and take care of them into the future. While he makes a case for war with Iran that is flawed and so full of holes you could fly a C-130 airplane through it. The biggest flaw in his argument is lack of understanding, or purposeful confusion, of the difference between Sunni and Shia. That Shia Iran and Sunni Al Qaeda, who hate each other and want to destroy each other, are working together in Iraq against the US. There is simply zero evidence to support that proposition, and zero evidence for the argument that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Either McCain knows this and is doing the same thing the Bush administration did in the lead up to

the war in Iraq, or he doesn't know it. Either situation is equally, as put by Pepe Escobar of The Real News in the video below, scary. And together with his lack of support so far for this new GI Bill, is the ultimate in McHypocrisy.

Winter Soldier: A Tale of Two Hell's

In this first video, this Iraqi citizen's comparison of the hell of Sadaam and the hell of the American occupation should tell Americans all we need to know about how Iraqis feel about the war. Both videos are from Winter Soldier, eye witness accounts of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by the soldiers who served there. Ironically May 15 was the 40th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. I don't know if Winter Soldier's event was coordinated to coincide with it. I see no mention of that fact on their site.

When you listen to the stories it sounds as if My Lai has happened over and over again in Iraq and Afghanistan. As it did in Vietnam. I don't think Americans have been told everything about the way the war was conducted in Vietnam. Most believe there was only one My Lai. And they certainly don't realize what's happening in the current wars or they would be over. You can see as the soldiers tell the stories how difficult what happened was for them. It's no wonder that so many of them suffer from PTSD, and find it hard to reintegrate into society. And many end up homeless, which should never happen.

The other irony in looking back at My Lai and comparing it today is that with the embedded press, managed by the military, stories like My Lai are not very likely to be exposed. Except by these soldiers who are brave enough to tell the truth. Every time we hear the phrase, Support the Troops from chickenhawk pundits and politicians who really mean, support the war, we should think of people like this.