Liberal Moron?

     This in response to a comment from a former student and Iraq vet who implied I am a "liberal moron" because I posted a meme showing  Fox News in a bad light . 

            I root for the side which doesn't waste our troops in a war we started and never finished, against an enemy who never attacked us. Every PTSD, amputee, and otherwise injured soldier we sent to Iraq lies on the head of George W. Bush. The soldier you posted in the meme is clearly a WWII soldier, the next to last "just" war we engaged in, Korea being the last.

         Since then we have, in the name of Oil, or "We gotta kill someone for 9/11" sent brave young Americans off to die in places where we should not have been. Many who served in Iraq feel angry at those who criticize that war, in the same fashion Viet Nam vets (some of them) criticized anyone who thought that  was a bad war. The reaction is one of "I was there, and if the war was an unjust war, what I did was wrong." That anger should be directed at Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and the neocons who propelled us into it, but in many cases it isn't. Why? Can't answer that.

         It doesn't take a lot of critical analysis, starting with what Colin Powell and numerous Bush White House staffers have later said, to figure out that we ill used our military by invading Iraq. It only takes a rudimentary knowledge of history to realize that Russia and Great Britain failed in Afghanistan , as we probably will in the long run. It also takes a sense of the change over time in the world to understand that which has brought us to the point at which we are. Terrorism changes the entire face of how we use our troops. WW II and Korea were simple. we knew where and who the bad guys were. My war (the Cold War) was scary, but also simple, it was us and the Soviets and we knew, as they knew, that we could destroy them no matter what they did first. In the end, they went broke trying to keep up in an economic system which didn't work, If anyone won the Cold War it was Adam Smith, certainly not any US President.

        Viet Nam was fought because we were too dense to see that Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first, a Communist second. He begged us not to let France steal his country again, and we not only refused to help, we helped France. 58,000 US troops dead and over a million Vietnamese dead later, we left. Nixon called it "Peace with honor", but we and the world  knew better. Jump ahead from 1975 to 20015. We now have $35 billion annual trade and $1.1 annual investment in Vietnam. No one had to die to accomplish this, but they did. This was the last war we fought with any semblance of "conventional" tactics, and when these broke down in the 1960s, it became the guerilla quagmire which lasted until 1975 when we declared victory and retreated. Many Viet Vets have never come to grips with that, but those who have returned to Vietnam , have, in many cases.

         The current Mideast mess is far worse and far different than Vietnam, because the aspect of religious fanaticism (on both sides) is in the mix, as well as terrorist tactics (can't always tell the good guys from the bad guys, and sometimes they're the same). I wish I had the answer, but I don't. Unfortunately at this point, with 13,000 US dead (civilian and military, and half are civilians) and a total of somewhere around 350,000 dead, we are no better off than when Saddam Hussein ran Iraq. Counting all the deaths, we are for worse off. The very definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting a different result. 

        So call me a liberal moron, but I served this nation 26 years, so don't you dare question my patriotism. Perhaps the better patriotism to question would be that of the old men who sent the young men to die in the desert in a war based on hype, lies, and (since "W,"  upon taking office didn't even know what Sunnis and Shi'ites were [fact] and why they hated each other) gross ignorance on the part of an easily manipulated President with an agenda.  I grieve for all the casualties we suffered in Iraq, but more so because they never should have occurred.