Soapbox

No Visible Means of Support

I was shocked and appalled, but not terribly surprised by something I read in today’s Dispatch letters. A woman whose grand-daughter is in Iraq wrote to complain that when George Bush played dress-up back in May and landed on the aircraft carrier to declare that the war was over, her granddaughter got a paycut. The government was immediately able to reduce the pay of all the soldiers serving there, by making them no longer were eligible for combat pay. So they’ve been there all these months since then, being spat on, shot at, and blown out of the sky, thousands of miles from their friends and families- doing it for minimum wages, because George wants to pretend that the war is over.
If the President really believes his own spin, why doesn’t he go and tour Iraq? Why doesn’t he skip a few of his rich-white-guy Republican fundraiser dinners and go visit the place where we are not at war, and let the grateful Iraqis show their appreciation? Why? Because today’s paper also reported that Richard Armitage, deputy Secretary of State described Iraq as a “war zone”.
So is it a war zone, or is combat over?

From the beginning, Bush and his neo-con cronies have been trying to wage this war on the cheap. First they refused to send in the proper number of troops that the military (the guys whom one might think would know a thing or two about this) said was necessary. Over the spring and summer we heard stories of soldiers writing to their families and asking them to buy things like flak jackets, night-vision goggles and water purifiers and send them to Iraq, because the ones the army had were of poor quality, or there simply weren’t enough to go around!

Another Dispatch article reported that the helicopters that were shot down this past week were not equiped with the latest technological hardware that would make it harder for surface missles to hit them. Why? Because they were army reserve choppers, and they don’t have the money to equip them. The reservists have had their tour of duty doubled by President Bush, but they have to do that tour with old, slow choppers that make them easy candidates to come home in a body bag.

This is shameful. I was against this war from the beginning and certainly don’t like pouring my money into the sands of Iraq, but now that we’re there I refuse to pinch pennies when it comes to the men and women whose lives are on the line. I am frankly appalled by a President who would do so. How can a commander-in-chief face himself in the mirror each morning knowing he sent his troops off to die without even giving them the equipment or the numbers they need? But the shame doesn’t end there.

Army pay, for the enlisted soldiers anyway, is pretty low, but at least there are good benefits: medical care, college tuition, pensions. While loudly trumpeting his patriotism and concern for our troops with his public face, the President quietly cut veterans benefits and allowed soldiers or their families to be asked to pay for all their own hospital food when theyare wounded and-unbelievably- part of the cost of their own funerals when they are killed in this non-war that’s been killing them off daily.

What would you call a policy like that : Operation Billions for Haliburton and a buck for the front-line troops? Oh wait- I forgot: in the world according to Bush, there IS no front line, because the war is over. This is the same fantasy world where the increasing violence and death in Iraq is merely proof that we are doing things right, where a man can stand before the world and say that he will liberate and do right by the people of Afghanistan (remember Afghanistan? There was a war in Afghanistan) and then calmly cut the budget for the re-building effort.

But the saddest thing about this sad story is that it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. George W. Bush has been short-changing the American people since he took the oath of office. He gives millions in tax breaks to the rich and pennies to the poor. He declares Christmas in January with a repeal of the estate tax and dividend taxes for the wealthy and leaves his “No Child Left Behind” education plan so under-funded that poor children will once again be left behind.

Bush doles out big fat favors to business and industry by letting polluters regulate themselves and businesses set their own rules, but nickle-and-dimes Homeland security, placing us all in potential danger from the terrorists he assures us are lurking under every bed. Liberals and conservatives agree that our power grid and nuclear facilities are un-protected, the public health system lacks the funds for even basic innoculations against bio-terror and the police, fire and rescue units cannot even afford to get the equipment they need to communicate with each other.

So, if George Bush doesn’t support low-income tax payers and he doesn’t support people with no health insurance, or poor children in Head Start programs that have been cut back: if he doesn’t support the police or firefighters, nurses and EMT’s or people who have seen their jobs go overseas due to policies of mega-corporations, if he doesn’t even support the soldiers and their families enough to pay them a decent wage or appear at one memorial service for one fallen soldier whom he put in harm’s way, then the question we have to ask ourselves is, why would anyone support George Bush?

Think about the cost of a soldier’s funeral when you’re watching him spend $170 million on his re-election campaign.