Can we talk about "supporting the troops"?

Joe Galloway:

This Memorial Day, 2009, America is mired in two wars. The one in Iraq is supposed to begin winding down this summer, even as the other, in Afghanistan, is building toward a new crescendo.

We have a new President, Barack Obama, who was elected on a promise of change. For those few who wear the uniform of our country, however, nothing has changed. They continue to serve and sacrifice in wars in distant lands whose purpose and goals and eventual end are as fuzzy now as they were when they began in the dawn of this new century.

However you celebrate Memorial Day this year — however happy or solemn the occasion — spare a thought and a moment of silence in memory of all those who purchased your freedom with their lives, and of all those who defend it still.

If you are given to prayer, pray that one day our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines will know true peace somewhere short of the grave.

Except, if the mission is "fuzzy," then the mission probably isn't as clearcut as "defending our country" let alone "purchasing our freedom." Total contradiction, but even Galloway can't say it, perhaps because it cannot be said.

Dare I suggest that those in authority who use the lives of our troops to plant themselves firmly in the seats of their own power are the ones who are not "supporting" the troops?

The wars up until recently have been about taking resources or enforcing extraordinarily lop-sided economic arrangements on weaker countries. Then the U.S. upper class, rather than maintaining the value-adding economic processes in their native land, discovered they could profit more by dismantling the economy, which they have proceeded to do.

So now, how will the rich and powerful make money in competition with foreign elites? The same way poor princelings made money in the early modern era -- by selling mercenaries. Think Hessians in the Revolutionary War. But instead of just soldiers, our elites will rent out a whole war machine. It worked well in Gulf War I with Kuwait and the coalition. Not only will our troops not be "defending our freedom"; they'll be the workers in the factory of violence fulfilling a contract for the bosses. Look for more bayoneted baby stories. Meanwhile, as Steve Earle notes, it's "just another poor boy off to fight a rich man's war."

here:

There is the hegemony US, and there is the domestic US. Many critics of Iraq predicted that there would be a collapse of the US empire, and that we would go back to being a neo-Jeffersonian subsistence Republic. This view, prevalent on what might be called "the disaffected right," has been exactly wrong. The reason is simple: the rest of the world wants American security and financial hegemony, albeit with greater controls, but it does not care about American consumerism beyond the level needed to keep their own domestic economies supplied with dollars.

One can see this dynamic playing out in the recent G20 summit: where France and Germany wanted financial regulation, but were not interested in stimulating domestic consumption. One can see this in the debt markets: the treasury auctions in the United States have gone off, where as the UK auctions have stuttered. The libertarian illusion was that good old Americans were pulling their weight in the world, and that this imperial scheme was dropped on top of it. The reality was that the imperial scheme is profitable in the eyes of the rest of the world, whereas American suburbia and exurbia are the designated losers of the economic world. They aren't willing to loan us money to buy their goods any more, but they will loan us money to bomb the Taliban, kill pirates, and prop up the global financial order.

So that is what is going on: the bail out, as everyone admits, is socialism for Wall Street. However the other side is that the United States is now on shock therapy, and most of the economy is on the outside looking in. Taking out the defense and financial sectors, and the unemployment rate in the United States isn't the headline 8.5%, but is, in fact, closer to 15% and marching upwards. There is no domestic economy for all practical purposes at this point, other than what is needed to extract every loose dime from the American public to pay off debts. The American Empire is alive and well, as the Roman Empire was alive and well, even as its public was crushed under the weight of debts.

Any uniform will do. Firefighter. Coast guard. Merchant marine.
Police department, sheriff's office, other local law enforcement agency.
Public health.
Nursing.
Search and rescue.
EMT.

Hard to explain what it means to know you delivered when you were called upon to stand and do so for someone who's never heard that call.

If you regard war as an export, if you regard national reputation as hegemony, if you regard alliances as profitmakers and commitments as calumny, I don't know what to say to you.

How about what most all liberals I know have been saying forever, now, and that is that we support getting our troops back home? I think Silber, in all of his wordiness, gives a rather revisionist history or reality of the left that, somehow, most of the left uses the term "support the troops" in the very same meaning, or even that most use it, at all. That simply hasn't been my experience, nor do I personally use the term.

I also think the CnC who started the war in Iraq ought to be hanged as a traitor, but then I have an old grudge on that score. You can't get enough rope to deal with the horrors the Bush/Cheney maladministrative cabal unleashed on the world.