Pulling at Our Heartstrings

In his first televised Oval Office address since the Iraq segment of the War on Terror began, President Bush urged listeners to support the work of our soldiers. To pullout, he says, would be a waste of our soldiers' effort and even worse, an insult to those who came back wounded and the families of those who did not come back at all. Sure, Bush has slashed veterans compensation and healthcare, failed to provide body armor and, even as recently as last week, a marine’s body was shipped home freight-rate with ordinary cargo. Specialist Matthew J. Holley was 21 years old when he died from wounds as a result of an improvised explosive device detonated outside his vehicle in Taji last Month. Many were outraged at the lack of official transport, and after calls were put into California Sen. Barbara Boxer’s office, an Honor Guard of the 101st Airborne Division flew in to greet Holley’s crate on the tarmac. Those who support the troops got exactly what they wanted: proper burial.

The Holley case is another in a string of events that come into evidence against the sincerity of Bush’s own support for ordinary soldiers. But somehow the response of protest groups has been an outpouring of support for troops, as if to out-support the supporters of the war—to prove that the chickenhawks are insincere. This line of thinking fails to recognize how Bush rests much of his own political gravitas on the popular image of the soldier-as-savior. The administration constantly draws comparisons between the sacrifices (read: fatalities) of the War on Terror and the sacrifices on the beaches of WWII, and Bush’s recent appearance was no different: “This war, like others in our history…” The Greatest Generation weighs like a nightmare upon the brain of the living. The WWII analogy makes the War on Terror into a simple cost-benefit analysis that can justify any amount of “sacrifice” for what the administration regularly admits is a priceless good: freedom. Both sides are equally guilty of framing the war debate in terms of individual soldiers’ bodies—whether it is Bush celebrating the troops as selfless heroes, or anti-war activists holding them up as victims of a lie, the argument for supporting our troops substitutes the body-count for political arguments about the war.

Support is good. We should support one another. But to “support our troops” is not an act of sympathy with the individuals on the ground, but a blind acceptance of the political conditions that put troops in the line of fire, leave them with life-long injuries that require expensive medical care, or send them home KIA in an undignified way. Opposing the war cannot be a campaign to improve the lives of soldiers, it is foremost a struggle against the political conditions of the war itself. The bodies are a smokescreen: as long as people support the troops, this and future administrations will continue to deploy “boots on the ground”, knowing that all it takes to pull the war debate away from politics is a tug at our heartstrings. Let the fruits of occupation spoil, let our soldiers' efforts be wasted—If the antiwar crowd is tethered to the wrong debate, then it’s time to cut our leading strings.