Listen, If We Can't Support the Troops, We Should Pull Them
by James Glaser
August 24, 2007

How many times have you heard President Bush talk about getting the troops everything they need to fight his war in Iraq? George Bush, the man who deserted his National Guard Unit during the Vietnam War—the man who is now the Commander in Chief of the world's greatest military has once again deserted "his" unit.

The only trouble now is that George's "unit" is every Soldier, Marine, Sailor, and Air Man who is serving our country. Our troops are not getting the equipment they need to fight this war. We know that our enemy's most powerful weapon is the hidden roadside bomb that has killed and maimed thousands of our troops. We have the technology, and have even developed, and put into production the vehicle that can protect our troops.

What we have produced is an armored V-shaped hull vehicle that deflects the explosion of these buried bombs away from the occupants inside. This new military tool has been tested, and 3,900 of them have been built, but as Lolita Baldor, of the Associated Press reports, "The Pentagon will fall far short of its goal of sending 3,500 lifesaving armored vehicles to Iraq by the end of the year, officials expect to send about 1,500."

Military generals claim they could use many thousands of these armored troop movers right now, and the fact is we have almost 4,000 of them built right now. But for some reason the Bush administration is not making the introduction of these life-saving vehicles into the combat zone a priority. Our troops won't even get half of those already produced, and they needed them three years ago.

Like I said, thousands of our troops have been killed, and many thousands more have been maimed because they didn't have the equipment they needed to fight George Bush's War. We have that equipment sitting on the dock ready to go, but hundreds, maybe thousands more of our troops will be killed and wounded before the Pentagon gets these new armored vehicles to Iraq.

It takes leadership to get our troops the support they need, and as George Bush proved during the Vietnam War, and continues to prove in this war, he is not up to that task. The number of American dead and wounded proves that.




Free JavaScripts provided
by The JavaScript Source


BACK to the 2007 Politics Columns.