by Sassafras

Created on: April 16, 2008

For an hour every Friday from 2003 to 2006, along with other war protesters I held signs while standing on a Santa Fe, New Mexico street corner. One of my signs read "Support Our Troops: Bring Them Home Now". Nowadays even most right wingers agree that the Iraq invasion and occupation were illegal, and five years later it continues to be a political quagmire and a bottomless money pit for the United States. Someday-when they're no longer protected by their office-if there is a God, or at least a few genuine patriots, Bush/Cheney Inc. will be tried as war criminals.

According to the libertarian website antiwar.com, as of April 14, 2008, 4035 troops have been killed in Iraq, with anywhere from 23,000 to 100,000 soldiers wounded, depending on what source is cited. Sourcewatch.org reports that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs had treated 20,638 Iraq veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder by 2006 and had a waiting list of hundreds of thousands of other psychologically damaged troops.

You could make a case for all the deaths and trauma to our troops if something was actually being accomplished. But it isn't. Simply stated, Iraq remains a war that was conceived under false pretenses and drags on today in a world far more dangerous than it was when it began. There are more terrorists than ever before, and thanks to Bush, Iraq has become a hotbed of terrorism, something it was not under Saddam's dictatorship. Contrary to what neocons continue to want you to believe, the war was not fought to preserve the freedoms of Americans. There is compelling evidence that it was really fought so that Bush Junior could prove to his daddy, who started his own much briefer Iraq war, that he had the cojones to finish what Bush Senior began.

But supporting the troops is something quite different from supporting a preemptive, needless war. I've heard war enthusiasts state that "freedom isn't free", and that's true enough, but they never explain what protecting freedom has to do with the Iraq occupation because there simply isn't a logical connection. In fact, our freedoms are threatened more than ever because of the enemies the United States has made through this terrible carnage carried out by troops who are either misled into thinking that it's necessary or who realize that it's wrong but face courts martial if they oppose it. And while these soldiers are supposedly over there defending our freedoms, through the Patriot Act Bush has methodically siphoned away many of those

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