Jeff Jacoby is one of the better conservative columnists out there. He’s reality-based, not particularly dogmatic. He also wasn’t afraid to call Yasir Arafat out for what he was, a man of evil and the father of modern terrorism, while others were feting him after his death. (“Arafat the Monsterâ€)
Sadly, his last editorial was so incredibly offensive and wrong, I don’t even know to write about. it. I’ll just quote extensively and see if anything comes to mind.
WHAT DOES IT mean to support the troops but oppose the cause they fight for?
No loyal Colts fan rooted for Indianapolis to lose the Super Bowl. No investor buys 100 shares of Google in the hope that Google’s stock will tank. No one who applauds firefighters for their courage and education wants a four-alarm blaze to burn out of control.
Yet there is no end of Americans who insist they “support” US troops in Iraq but want the war those troops are fighting to end in defeat. The two positions are irreconcilable. You cannot logically or honorably curse the war as an immoral neocon disaster or a Halliburton oil grab or “a fraud . . . cooked up in Texas,” yet bless the troops who are waging it.
Supporting the troops means that you support the individual soldiers, and the job they have to do. It means that you respect the choice they made to fight for their country, and want that choice to be respected by others. It means you respect the sacrifice they have made so that others don’t need to. It means you want them to be well-trained, well-equipped, well-managed. It means you want veterans to receive care, that soliders shouldn’t be preyed on payday lenders, etc.
Mostly, it means that if they must sacrifice their lives, it must be for something worth sacrficing it for.
But logic and honor haven’t stopped members of Congress from trying to square that circle. The nonbinding resolution they debated last week was a flagrant attempt to have it both ways. One of its two clauses professed to “support and protect” the forces serving “bravely and honorably” in Iraq. The other declared that Congress “disapproves” the surge in troops now underway — a surge that General David Petraeus , the new military commander in Iraq, considers essential.
America is a free country, but it is not the Michael Moores or the ROTC-banners or the senatorial loudmouths who keep it free. They merely enjoy the freedom that others are prepared to defend with their lives. It is the men and women who volunteer to wear the uniform to whom we owe our liberty. Surely they deserve better than pious claims of “support” from those who are working for their defeat.
In Jacoby’s world, there are two options.
1) Support the troops, and every military mission there is to the hilt. As long as the mission has been defined somewhere (ferinstance, “Victory in Iraqâ€, that’s a good one), you can never turn back.
2) Don’t support the mission, and start spitting on the troops.*
Didn’t we do this already in Vietnam? Isn’t that why the whole Support the Troops thing started, to distinguish the times from the Vietnam era? Do we really even need to hash this out again?
* It turns out that spitting on soliders essentially never happened in the Vietnam era, or ever. It was one giant urban myth. For more on this, see here and here. In a different context that seems to apply to this very post, the author “…believes that the “myth” is involved in helping to promote the yellow ribbon campaign; it has led some to think that for one to support troops, one must therefore also support the war, because it ties together the ideas of anti-war sentiment and anti-troop sentiment.†Touche, Mr. Jacoby!