Love Our Troops, Hate The War

I’ve taken the Philadelphia Inquirer to task recently for pretending to cover (here I go again with that word – dive…dive…) the “blogosphere,” because I thought that what they did was write about stuff that, pretty much, was utter nonsense of one type or another that pertained to blogging in a vague and/or unimportant way (i.e., the demise of the T.V. show “The West Wing,” the length of the pants worn by our military personnel in a MoveOn.org ad protesting the war, etc.).

Well, I have to admit that they touched on something today that, apparently, has been pressing buttons all over the place, though it all was, quite literally, news to me. So, for the benefit of anyone who isn’t up on this, please allow me to explain.

About a week or so ago, Joel Stein, who I believe was a former Time correspondent before he got a job with the L.A. Times, wrote an opinion piece stating that he doesn’t support our troops and he doesn’t support the Iraq War, and he thinks that anyone who says that they support the troops but not the war is a wuss. In response, the Inquirer ran a column from someone named Angelina Sciolla who basically ridiculed Stein and said that anyone who said they supported the troops but not the war is a coward.

Update 2/6: Sorry...have to register for Stein's column at the L.A. Times site now. If I can find a link that doesn't require registration, I'll put it here.

(Note: I breathlessly await the day when we can have a discussion like this without the name calling, and yes – I’m aware of the fact that I’m guilty of that at times also. I went back and forth with Robert The Troll a few months ago and attempted to have some kind of dialogue like that with him in the post comments, but I got tired of his name-calling characterizations of people I respected and his unresponsiveness to my posts to the point where he would use the comments to pontificate on anything he wanted, so much so that I had to set up comment moderation. I’m sure that has discouraged commenting activity, though I don’t typically get a lot here anyway – that’s OK. Let’s just say that if the lefty bloggers and the right wingers got together and arranged a truce of sorts on that, I would sign on for it also.)

Before I go any further, I want to restate my position on both the troops and the Iraq War:

I support the troops, but not the war (I have NEVER supported this war).

Want me to repeat? OK.

I SUPPORT THE TROOPS, BUT NOT THE WAR.

Louder? Sure.

I SUPPORT THE TROOPS, BUT NOT THE WAR!!!!

And this is one of the ways that I'm doing it (not a lot, I know, but it's something).

I would confront Sciolla directly on this, but here’s the reason why I don’t.

As anyone who has spent any time at this site knows by now, I don’t really tell you much about who I am (the photo in the profile, as I pointed out earlier, is that of the actor Patrick McGoohan from approximately the mid 1960s who played characters that embodied a lot of qualities that I admire – determination, self reliance, an inherent mistrust and loathing of authority, etc.). It wouldn’t be too difficult to find out more about me, but the reason I do this is primarily for the sake of my family. If I knew that people on any side of the political equation would act the way they should all the time, then I would say more. But I don’t. And I don’t think that makes me a coward; actually, I don’t really care if anyone thinks that it does.

Besides, I’ve done a bit of poking around regarding Sciolla, and she’s been mentioned prominently at the leading “freeper” sites like Free Republic, so, as far as I’m concerned, she’s a yapping attack dog anyway (though I do give her credit if she actually DOES literally support our troops to one degree or another; her Inquirer bio says that she writes letters of support to our soldiers at Walter Reed Army Hospital, and I can only hope that she is trying to provide comfort in doing that instead of advocating her politics).

In his column that started this ruckus, Stein makes what I believe is an excellent point (also made in a highly articulate way by Bill Moyers a couple of years ago); namely, that we adorn our jacket lapels and dresses and vehicles with pins, ribbons, etc. that say “Support Our Troops,” “Freedom Isn’t Free” and the like to pump ourselves up and hide the guilt that we feel over the fact that we have basically encouraged the amoral cabal that currently rules this country to sacrifice our troops on a fool’s errand in Iraq (the collective “we” probably including more people than it should here, I know). Aside from Stein’s other pointlessly snide remarks, that is the reason (I believe) why the “101st Fighting Keyboarders,” as Atrios calls them, went absolutely nuts, kicking and screaming furiously at the site of The National Review and columnist Jim Geraghty, who set up a comment forum on Stein’s piece.

Here is exactly what Moyers said about that, by the way, which he said to close an episode of his program "NOW":

“I wore my flag tonight, first time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans. Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustain me, whose armed forces protected me and whose ideals inspired me. I offered my heart’s affection in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood. So does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15th. So what’s this doing here? I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo, the trademark – the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On most Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it’s the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official labels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s Little Red Book of orthodoxy on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

”But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapel while writing books and running web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks, even as they call for spending more on war.

”So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks. or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the ‘Coalition of the Willing.’ I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government, and it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war, except in self defense, is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.”

Amen.

Actually, between Stein and Sciolla’s columns, I don’t know which disgusted me more, so the Inquirer definitely got people stirred up for no good reason – that should help their circulation and their bargaining position during the pending sale of Knight Ridder. Stein “poked a stick in the eye,” as it were, at the radical right, which is stupid to do because those people are perpetually angry anyway and don’t need any reminder to be that way. Sciolla’s column was an insult because of statements such as this:

I supported the removal of Saddam and the attempt at establishing democracy in the region. I had also come to see some kind of U.S. presence in that part of the world as an inevitability, whether now or 10 years from now, when - as we currently contemplate the meaning of a Hamas victory in Palestine - we can hardly imagine what the political landscape will be.

I’ll probably be repeating this until my dying day, but the Iraq War was NOT originally sold to us as a war to bring democracy to Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein because he was a mean, rotten guy. It was sold to us on the basis that Iraq had WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION that could be HANDED OFF TO AL QAEDA, A GROUP WITH WHICH HUSSEIN WAS ALLIED AS SUPPORTED BY DOCUMENTED EVIDENCE, and the weapons would be USED TO DESTROY US. When the fact that this explanation was utter crap was finally exposed, the war became one “to bring Democracy to Iraq.” I also categorically reject Sciolla’s assertion that our military presence in that region was inevitable, and I laugh and wince at the same time over the notion that our troops “could win the war.” I respect, admire, and – yes – support our troops, but the situation was unwinnable in a scenario actually worse than Vietnam because of the region’s strategic importance assigned to it by our greedhead dependency on fossil fuel.

(By the way, every time we have this stupid argument back and forth from either side about “supporting our troops,” Dubya, Karl Rove, and Frank Luntz laugh their asses off because it distracts us from the dialogue that we SHOULD be having about the war, as spurred on by courageous individuals like Cindy Sheehan and Rep. John Murtha.)

So, bravo Inquirer! You FINALLY hit on something in your Op-Ed page about blogging that is timely, interesting, and important.

Now, all you have to do is tell Kevin Ferris to “hit the bricks” once and for all to truly make my day.

Update 2/1: Oh, so now "supporting the troops" isn't a good thing? Is it because that slogan (which CNN now considers to be "anti-war") doesn't support Bushco's PR purposes any more?