1115.org

NYT:

Staff Sergeant David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.
[...]
With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in Delta Company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers over a one-week period, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.
[...]
“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sergeant First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.”

I don’t think Safstrom and Moore are talking to me. I think they’re talking to the JimC’s of this world.

It’s really easy to sentimentalize this sitting at home, and tell yourself that by golly, you’re going to support the troops, and press for victory, because the opposite of victory is shame for the troops.

The troops know that for the hogwash it’s always been.

The opposite of victory is shame only for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Feith. And every one of these major league a**-holes deserves every last bit of this shame.

Denouncing withdrawal from Iraq has absolutely zilch to do with not giving up on the troops. It has everything to do with continuing to put your trust in men who have demonstrated tirelessly, over and over again, that any trust you place in them is tragically misplaced. Men who continue to cynically sacrifice troops so that they can continue to maintain the fiction (that nobody but them even buys any more) that there is still hope of victory, if only we hang in there long enough. That the shame of non-victory, when it comes, will belong to their successors or their opponents.

It’s time to look yourself in the eye, and ask yourself how long you are going to keep buying this crap.

It’s time to turn to George Bush and tell him: “Mr. President, go f*** a duck! Because I’m not going to support shafting the troops any more.”

Staff Sergeant David Safstrom and Sergeant First Class David Moore are still alive. Let’s fight to keep it that way.

And let’s recognize that’s that’s the only meaningful way to support the troops. Voting to extend the war — and supporting such a vote — is tantamount to signing, at the current rate, blank death warrants for more than a hundred U.S. troops a month. Only in the most cynically dishonest Bush double-speak does that constitute supporting the troops.