I mailed another letter to my senator, Dick Durbin, today. It starts this way:
Senator Durbin,
With the election of Barack Obama to the White House, we have turned the corner from Republican-led and Democratically-funded misuse of our Armed Forces, to Democratically led and funded misuse of our Armed Forces.
[Letter continued] Democrats in Washington are no longer enablers of the ongoing abuse of our Armed Forces, but have become the entire problem itself. Democrats own every single death and disability which is sustained by our troops. Half the blood is not on Democratic hands; all of the blood is now on your hands.
You know as well as I that whether our troops stay in Iraq and Afghanistan for another year, or ten years, or a hundred years, when we leave, those people are entitled to destroy whatever we’ve built there, and determine their own fate.
Does the idea of just bringing our troops home give you anxiety? If so, why not find constructive means for dealing with your anxiety? Keeping our troops mired in these Iraq and Afghan hellholes is one very dubious way of actually protecting our country, you know. It’s a sure-fire way to guarantee that corpses and disabled service members keep coming home.
Congressional Democrats and President Obama are proving there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them and the Bush government when it comes to endless, needless war. Or, you could prove this to be wrong.
Talk with Obama, if you need, and talk with your colleagues. Tell them enough is enough. This insanity should end. Not later, but sooner. Bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, without more excuses, foot-dragging, and double talk.
xxxx
Member, Military Families Speak Out
mfso.org
I don't know how many Kos diarists know what strain our troops and their families endure. My twenty-two year old son has served fourteen months in Iraq, and will deploy to Afghanistan in two months.
Have you heard of anticipatory grief? If not, here's how it happens for me and others. Every day, sometimes several times a day, while my son's deployed, I will again see in my mind an image of two soldiers dressed in class A uniforms coming down my driveway with some news. That's called anticipatory grief. It's very common, you know.
Last year, I took my youngest off to start her freshman year at a very nice small college. The school had several well-organized sessions for the parents, while the incoming freshmen were going to their own meetings. In the parents' sessions, the focus was on "how to let go" of their progeny. I was amazed at the outpouring of emotion and anxiety from the other parents about leaving their little darlings at this bucolic college campus. I didn't get it. Why were they having so many issues with it? And why was I having no issue with it at all?
Then it dawned on me.
At this peaceful, small town college campus, the students will not be subject to daily mortar attacks, sniper fire, RPGs, and IEDs. At the end of the year, seventeen members of the student body will not have come home as corpses, and triple that number will not have sustained horrifying wounds, as happened in my son's battalion. Dropping off a kid at college is a piece of cake, ya see, compared to what I've been through! is what I wanted to scream at the other parents.
I took Senators Durbin and Obama to task for how they did nothing, during the Bush years, to take effective action to bring our troops home. (I had two face-to-face meetings with Durbin, and met with Durbin and Obama's policy poohbahs on Capitol Hill.) They could have led filibusters against the Iraq funding, as we members of Military Families Speak Out urged. (It's hard to fool us; we know that continued funding of these missions is exactly what kills and maims our troops.) Durbin and Obama could have shown some leadership in our government, could have been an actual independent branch of government, but they acted as if they didn't get it.
So, President Obama and the Democratically-led Congress are going to lesiurely withdraw troops from Iraq...maybe...while ramping it up in another theater (as promised!) which you have to make all kinds of intellectual contortions to justify.
And, since these occupations of foreign countries will no longer be paid for by supplementals, but will be part of the Defense budget, the effect will be to institutionalize these horrendous political mistakes as Democratic warmongering. (Can you picture congressional Democrats voting against Obama's budget?)
C'mon, Senator Durbin and President Obama, you're not fooling us. Give the troops some actual support -- bring them home, sooner, not later. And think of all the money you can use right here for green tech, roads and bridges, and getting us OFF foreign oil, or for bonuses for Wall Streeters, take yer pick.