I support our troops' right to be led to slaughter by cowardly millionaire chickenhawks who had their daddies pull strings for them during Vietnam so they wouldn't have to go to war like the sons of the working classes.
I support our troops' right to be deployed in a hostile country, 15,000 miles away, and to be killed, maimed, and wounded.
I support our troops' right to be taken prisoner by a murderous regime.
I support our troops in the struggle to give (millionaire) Richard Cheney's former company Halliburton a multi-million dollar contract to rebuild the oil wells that will be destroyed in this war.
I support our troops for protecting Colin Powell's right to present fabricated documents before the U.N. Security Council, in order to provide justification for an unjustifiable war.
I support our troops' right to fight a war in violation of international law, opposed by 80% of the world's population, and guaranteed to be used as a recruitment tool for Al-Qaeda.
I support our troops in taking down a dictator who received his chemical weapons from US and British sources back in the 1980s, when Saddam was our friend and the US looked the other way while he gassed the Iranians.
I support our troops' right to stain their souls forever with the spilled blood of ordinary human beings, soldiers and civilians, women and men, children and infants, and to see brains spilled out on pavement and intestines bloated from the sun and fingers and hands eaten by crows.
I support our troops in developing psychic trauma from this war, and I support their return to America shell-shocked and jobless and shunted into the hell-hole of the Veterans Administration bureaucracy.
I support our troops' right to go after a regime which, according to the CIA in its 2002 threat estimate, did not pose an "imminent" threat to US national security--a regime which (according to the CIA) would have an interest in attacking America directly if we invaded that country.
I support our troops' right to fight in complete ignorance of the cynical policies of the cynical politicians who sent them there, the cowardly Republicrats, all millionaires, whose children are safely ensconced at Yale and Harvard and the State Department.
I support our troops in defending "democracy" and "freedom" in Iraq, even while the Iraqi exiled opposition complains that the US State Dept. and CIA are trying to prevent a democratic post-Saddam regime (as they did in 1991), and even though the same people leading them to war are the very same people who stole the 2000 election and are destroying our democracy at home, eroding our Constitution through surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus, harassment of honest Muslim-Americans, and lying to the people about their ulterior motives in attacking Iraq.
I support our troops' right to return to this country and to use their Apache helicopters and Tomahawk cruise missiles against the filthy oil companies and rich elites and yahoo commentators and cowards in the Capitol for having exposed their precious minds, bodies, and souls to death, destruction, and the organized murder of another people.
March 24, 2003
John Sanbonmatsu Assistant Professor of Philosophy Department of Humanities and Arts Worcester Polytechnic Institute 100 Institute Road Worcester, MA 01609 (508) 752-5925 js at wpi.edu
<http://www.uvm.edu/~wmiller/isupport.htm> *****
John Sanbonmatsu, _The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a Political Subject_ (Forthcoming - August 2003): <http://www.monthlyreview.org/forthcmg.htm>, <http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?products_id=3267>, & <http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?products_id=3268>. -- Yoshie
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