Letters to the Editor
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First things first...
As much as I admire Mr. Madden, and those like him, this truly makes me sick. Some "expert" declares that we went in as a unified nation? What planet is he on? And to expect this Congress to say any different is beyond naive.
Before we start deciding how to make an exit from this disaster, maybe we should start cleaning house at home by impeaching and locking up the bastards who created this mess. Then we can decide "as a unified nation" how we get out. There can be no role in that process for those who supported this folly.
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Good luck to those soldiers
I hope that they are able to get thier concerns across. I feel that because i'm only a civilian, i'm somehow unqualified to pass judgments on military matters, or so it would seem from what passes for political discourse in this country from the right. I hope to God that these soldiers can break through the wall of willful ignorance that surrounds bush cheney and rumsfeld and convince them to take a good look at the havoc they have unleashed.
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"There is a civil war going on and we are stuck in the middle of it,"
"There is a civil war going on and we are stuck in the middle of it,"
I'm sorry, but YOU created the civil war.
I wonder if you'd give a thought to the Iraqi people, who are truly stuck in the middle of it.
Just in case you're looking for some, sympathy can be found between "shit" and "syphillus" in the dictionary.
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a side note
If you want to see a very interesting and well made documentary about enlisted dissent during the Vietnam conflict watch "sir, no sir."
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Hey Ron,
I'm sorry, but YOU created the civil war.
Give me a break. The soldiers in question did NOT personally create this mess. Their leaders did, i.e., Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc. These soldiers are just following orders, while trying bravely to do what they can to bring this to an end. I'm sure there are many more soldiers with similar anti-war concerns who do not have the nerve to speak out.
You basically say you have no sympathy for these guys. Your hippy-ish anti-military bias is obvious.
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Fool me twice...
Well, if it's true that most members of the military vote GOP, then you could say they brought this on themselves.
If you vote for fools, then expect to get fooled.
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"blatantly evident that you are being exploited"
That is a gross misunderstatement.
As justified criticism is being thrown at the incompetent Republican leadership in this country, Bush is using the troops as a shield and claiming the criticism is being thrown at them.
This is the very reason why we are in Iraq in the first place. So Bush can pass his corrupt agenda and do so in the name of wartime urgency. Any disent is labeled as unpatriotic, treasonous and against the troops.
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battle royal
The ability of Madden to reach such “celebrity” should not be discounted. The significance of this protest is not in the hundreds who sign the “appeals for redress”, it is the support of the military higher-ups who are allowing this effort to go forward. It is symptomatic of the battle between the civilians of the Pentagon and the military establishment. This is a fierce political war. The militarists know they will eventually win because they always have the option of waiting out political officeholders (the power of bureaucrats over term-limited politicians). But sometimes waiting means too many casualties are taken, thus action must be initiated.
For years both sides having been trying to keep this war within ranks, but the “appeals of redress” is a signal that the military is reaching the limit of its patience. Certainly there will be more to come. The military will turn its cheek only so many times before a slap is met with a rigid neck.
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"There is a civil war going on and we are stuck in the middle of it"
The BLUE and the GREY have faded over the last 104 years, turning to the RED and the BLUE in this NeoConMens' New World Union.
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Hey, Ron!
In addition to what "Thor" has already said -- and excluding his ad hominem crack about hippies' anti-military bias -- about who's responsible for the Itaqi civil war, you might wish to consult a dictionary before attempting to appear smarter than you clearly are. It's s-y-p-h-i-l-i-s, not "syphillus"; "Ron" -- you can find it between retarded and sycophant in the dictionary.
As for R. Allen King, the REMF who states for the article that "we went to Iraq as a unified nation," there's nothing further from the truth. The American electorate was almost certainly more supportive of our initial engagement in Vetnam than they were for this debacle, and look how well that turned out, especially after the hidden truths came out. To claim America was unified on the eve of war in Iraq is absurd.
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A historical-medical footnote for your article
With the Vietnam adventure sliding into an abyss, that dissent would become more apparent as an Army that included many conscripts faced ugly resistance from within: soldiers disobeying orders, deserting, using drugs, and even "fragging" their own officers with grenades.
Footnote: All drugs used in Vietnam were not equal and they were not all a form of violent rejection of the war.
Marijuana is a natural medicine for post traumatic stress disorder. The active ingredients in marijuana closely resemble an eicosanoid called anadamide. One of the many natural functions of anandamide in the human brain is to protect both tissue and memory from the effects of servere trauma.
Anandamide does this important work through the CB1 receptor system.
This has been confirmed through animal research. Mice who don't have the genes necessary to produce a working CB1 receptor systems are born with an inability recover from trauma. They are born with permanent PTSD.
This animal research indicates that PTSD could be caused by some kind of damage to the CB1 receptor system so that anandamide is unable to do its proper job.
A study done in Vietnam in 1971 showed that combat soldiers who used marijuana recovered much more quickly from combat trauma than did soldiers who did not use marijuana.
By the way, this phenomenon wasn't confined to Vietnam. Most Americans don't know that US President Franklin Pierce once wrote his wife a letter claiming that those "Mexican hemp cigarettes" he liked to smoke were "the only good thing" about the Mexican-American War.
War and marijuana go together like chemo and marijuana. If you've got the first one, you're going to want the second. Look through history and you will see soldiers have always used it. It was used in the Mexican-American War, the American Revolution. WWI, WWII, the Korean War...
And I hear it grows wild in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And by the way, in both of those countries, isn't the side that does urine testing also the side that is losing?