In today's Memorial Day edition of Newsday, columnist Raymond J. Keating accuses the Democrats who voted against the emergency war appropriations bill once benchmarks were removed of "surrendering to terrorists" and "abandoning the troops." Here is the link to his column:
Raymond J Keating: Dems wrong in not backing troops
My open rebuttal to Mr. Keating appears below.
Dear Mr. Keating,
As someone who reads many news sources in addition to Newsday, I must say that your Memorial Day column, "Dems wrong in not backing troops," reflects the most deliberately naive and uninformed viewpoint that I have run across in many months.
It is pro-Bush Republican rhetoric, not objective analysis, that declares that trying to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq is the same as "not supporting the troops." Are we to believe that ignoring and falsifying pre-war intelligence, under-deploying and under-equipping the troops, and failing to plan for the aftermath of Saddam's fall -- such as this president has done -- constitute "supporting the troops?" It sounds to me, and to anyone with his eyes open, more like exploiting the troops for one's own selfish, arrogant, deluded ambitions.
"Ah," but you will say, "Bush has made mistakes, but he's correcting them now with his surge." But, even his top generals admit that this increase in troop numbers -- of troops that are fatigued from extended or repeated deployments -- is still too little, too late. We cannot at this stage contain a sectarian-based civil war that we allowed to happen through our bungling. Nor should we continue to sacrifice American lives in a mission that was wrongly conceived and wrongly executed. Despite your insistence that the Democrats can only criticize, but have no plan, several Democratic Senators have proposed quite reasonable plans for gradually reducing our military involvement in Iraq. By contrast, it is Bush who seems dug-in, desperate, and totally without a plan to get us out of Iraq.
Instead of dashing off what amounts to nothing more than a hysterical screed against Democrats that could have been written by the chairman of the RNC, Mr. Keating, you need to take a long, hard look at what terms like "defending this country" and "supporting the troops" actually mean. "Defending this country" means using intelligence wisely and diplomacy forcefully, and resorting to military intervention only when all other routes have failed. "Supporting the troops" means preparing both for war and the aftermath, rather than trusting to a cadre of ideologues while deliberately ignoring the facts. You seem to believe that sending young Americans to their deaths indefinitely without clearly defining our goals or demanding any evidence of progress somehow "honors" the troops who have already died. Most Americans now agree with me, however, that stopping the pointless bloodshed is the only honorable thing to do.
Cordially,
A Patriotic American