(Smart Words From) An Okie From Muskogee
In her piece entitled Texas Protests Change Columnist’s Perspective, Mary deJuliis makes the following statement:
I am not antiwar. As long as it is possible for people like Adolph Hitler to come to power and persecute people, then there is a possibility for a need of military action. We need military presence here at home to protect ourselves from attack, so closing all the bases under Base Realignment And Closure makes absolutely no sense to me. I’m not sure why we need all those military bases all over the world, as I don’t see the strategy of some of their locations. But I’m no expert.
I am antiwar in Iraq because we were lied to about why we are in Iraq, our troops still don’t have enough protective equipment, there were no weapons of mass destruction and Iraq wasn’t responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center. The first report I saw on CNN was that Marines had successfully secured 20 oil sites. It hasn’t been about taking democracy to the Iraqi people. The Downing Street memos, the massive number of soldiers returning wounded and with missing limbs and more than 1,841 American soldiers’ deaths, those are some of the reason’s I am against the war in Iraq.
Which is, I think, the right way to approach this situation. We’re never going to end this by declaring an end to all war, or by saying that all military action is a mistake. We’re only going to get out of this mess by looking at the mess itself and making it clear to people just why we need to be out of Iraq (and, to a lesser degree, why we never should have gone in).
Now, I loathe His Imperious Majesty as much as anyone in their right mind. But this has got to be about getting the troops home, not about bringing down the Empire. The Empire is rotten at the core and is about come come tumbling down on itself, anyway. And if the mainstream media won’t ride the Empire on things like the fact that no WMDs were found in Iraq and the Downing Street Memo – or worse, if we all just take the Empire’s “There’s nothing to see here” stonewalling lying down – we still need to get the troops home and out of harm’s way. They’re not there fighting against genocide, they’re not there defending America. They’re there because we let the Empire send them. And now it’s up to us to get them back home alive. The ones that still have a chance, anyway. So make like a smart monkey for a change and support Cindy Sheehan, and don’t paint her attempts to end this unjust and unnecessary bloodshed as nothing more than partisan politics. Take it for what it really is, a chance to save lives.