[Peace-discuss] Support Our Troops (fwd)

[C. G. Estabrook]

	I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS
	by John Sanbonmatsu

I support our troops' right to be lead 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
habeus corpus, harrassment 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