There's a Reason We Oppose Him

And it's not because we hate America. I am so sick of that old chestnut being trotted out every time someone from the opposition has the temerity to speak out against the imperial designs of a corrupt administration. It's effective, of course. It worked during the Cold War, why shouldn't it work now? Any who dare to criticize the Great Leader are obviously traitors who seek the destruction of our Homeland and offer succor to the Enemy.

Well, screw that. I love America, and the reason I criticize this administration is because I will be damned if I will watch the country I love destroyed from within by spoiled rich bastards with overdeveloped senses of entitlement. And I refuse to sit idly by and say nothing while our image around the world is irrevocably tarnished by an administration that had not only chosen war as the first resort while insisting it would be the last, but had already begun to fight it long before addressing either Congress or the UN.

Troop morale in Iraq is low, I agree. But it is not, as some have suggested here, because Democrats are opposing the war. No, it is because they have seen nearly two thousand of their comrades killed and thousands more wounded in what we were told would be a "cakewalk", among other rosy predictions. We were told they would be greeted as "liberators", where they are now clearly seen as occupiers. They were told "Mission Accomplished" and yet are still mired in a vicious guerilla war with no end in sight. They fight a well-armed insurgency because those in power had no post-invasion plan to secure the country, or the stockpiles of arms and ammunition that had, until the invasion, been secured by the UN. They face an increasingly hostile citizenry because there were not enough troops sent with the initial invasion to maintain order and secure the country's infrastructure (though the oil ministry seemed to be quite the priority). The following quote and link illustrate the inability (or unwillingness) of those in power to sufficiently plan for the aftermath of the invasion, despite repeated advice from top military advisors to do just that.

A similar warning came from Thomas Pickering, who had served the first President Bush as UN ambassador and had headed up a Council on Foreign Relations study on Iraq which concluded that the U.S. mission had lacked "vision and strategy." Pickering, too, urged Bush to make clear that the current U.S. deployment of some 200,000 troops in and around Iraq would have to be maintained for along time to come. Or, as General John Abizaid, who will assume command of the Iraq mission from the retiring General Tommy Franks next month, put it in congressional testimony this week, "for the foreseeable future." For obvious domestic political reasons, the Bush Administration going into the war had downplayed the scale and duration of a post-war occupation mission.

When then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told legislators that such a mission would require several hundred thousand U.S. troops, his assessment had been immediately dismissed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as "wildly off the mark." Wolfowitz explained that "I am reasonably certain that (the Iraqi people) will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down." Six weeks ago, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was still suggesting the U.S. force in Iraq could be reduced to 30,000 by the end of the year. But the prevailing assessment in Washington appears to be shifting to the idea of afigure closer to Shinseki's.

http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,461462,00.html

So don't tell me that the troops in Iraq even have the time to notice what I think of the president and his elite. They're too busy trying to stay alive, since those in power couldn't even manage to properly equip them for this war. And it is because all this is happening to American troops that I oppose the war and those who chose to start it. It is because I support our troops that I want them brought home now, and removed from a situation where their hopes for survival diminish daily.

Because, frankly, we could also use them here, especially those in the National Guard. We have been told time and again that the Bush administration is making us safer, that they are doing everything in their power to prevent another 9/11. But, in clear dismissal of nearly all the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, our ports are still unsecured, our chemical and nuclear facilities are vulnerable to attack and the celebrated Department of Homeland Security has yet to get its act together. It has squandered its budget, failed to organize the various agencies under its watch and functioned largely as an on-demand fear monger with threat-level elevations dictated by the administration, rather than the actual intelligence.

Some who comment on this site have attempted to paraphrase the "Bush lied, people died" slogan into "Newsweek lied, people died", as though the editors of that magazine presented blatant falsehoods that led directly to people's deaths. No. While it is true that the Newsweek article depended on an unreliable source for certain details, the core facts of the article are no longer in dispute and have, in fact, been verified by the Pentagon. The riots that led to those deaths were over the mistreatment of the Koran by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. The specifics are irrelevant. It was the abuse of the Koran that caused the riots, and that abuse (regardless of its specific form) did occur. But, of course, the best way to distract people from an unflattering truth is to focus on the discrepancies in the source.

I oppose an administration that wraps itself in the cloak of moral values and shows itself to be anything but moral. It is immoral to deny an entire segment of the American people their right to the pursuit of happiness by seeking to deny them the right to marry. It is immoral to starve social programs that give needed aid to the poor (children and the elderly in particular) in order to enable tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthiest citizens. It is immoral to promote the notion of a Social Security crisis and then offer nothing more than the vagaries of the stock market as a solution, which would do much to line the pockets of Wall Street brokerage firms, but do little to guarantee economic security for future generations of retirees. It is immoral to use the suffering of one woman to distract the country from your own failures and corruption, citing a belief in a "culture of life" after using lies and deceit to lead the nation into a war that has resulted in nothing but death. It is immoral to systematically remove environmental protections while insisting those same actions will strengthen them (The "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" initiatives, to name two).

I am an American citizen, and I love my country. And it is because I love my country that I am performing one of my most essential duties as an American citizen. I am demanding accountability from my leaders when I believe they are acting counter to the best interests of America.

We have been lied to, we have been pandered to and we have been set one against the other, Republican against Democrat, liberal against conservative, all to the detriment of this great country.

* Special thanks to Moxie for much of the research included in this post.