Women's Crossroads

It makes me feel sick—literally sick at heart—to hear the response of our president to the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations.

That bipartisan group, trying to find some way out of the morass created by BushCheney Inc., recommended phasing out most U.S. troops in Iraq by 2008.

I permitted myself a few days of cautious hope. But this morning’s news threw icy water on that faltering flame.

What has BushCheney come back with? A plan to increase the number of active-duty soldiers by tens of thousands, with additional recruiting efforts to start immediately.

How is it that we Americans are tolerating such incredible political deafness in our leaders? We don’t have the excuse that we are cowed by a ruthless totalitarian regime, as the Soviet people did when their leaders persisted in sending tens of thousands of young men into the maw of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Didn’t we send a clear message, in the November elections, that we were not happy with the Republicans’ conduct at home and abroad, and wanted change?

How could it be that those people now squatting in the White House just don’t get it?

And what will it take to get through to them?

The military generals have responded with businesslike approval—the military is a business, after all, and it’s natural for CEOs to take pleasure in watching their business grow in size and importance. Especially when it’s all paid for by the taxpayers!

Military planners estimate that each addition of 10,000 soldiers costs taxpayers $1.2 billion (a year? It's not clear how this figure actually plays out).

That estimate probably doesn’t take into account the expenses incurred in the countries where these soldiers are deployed—costs of reconstruction, training local armies, “building democracy,” etc.

And it certainly doesn’t account in any meaningful way for the tremendous cost in lost lives, as these young men, most of them gullible teenagers who have been indoctrinated by war-based video games to think of military service as fun and recreational, are tossed onto real-world battlefields, to do and to die.

Enough talk about Iraqis “standing up,” please. It’s time for Americans to stand up and remind BushCheney—and the Congress—that THEY WORK FOR US, and WE ARE NOT HAPPY WITH THIS WAR!

We are obviously going to have to say it REALLY REALLY LOUD, because it's clear that they have their hearing aids turned off, those gray-haired armchair warriors in the White House.

If the newly empowered Democrats in Congress let BushCheney and the generals get away with this new version of “staying the course,” their credibility will be ruined for at least a generation. And what will we do then? Who will we turn to, we hapless Americans?

Let's start by acknowledging that rearranging the nameplates on the chairs in Congress doesn't accomplish anything unless the voters remain vigilant and active after the elections. Nobody else is going to do it for us. If we want change, we've got to make it happen ourselves, one day and one battle at a time.

Let's start today.

Labels: American politics, antiwar, Iraq war