Besides, what does "I support the troops" mean.
Well, in my case, it means that I respect their talent, ability, and professionalism, and that I pray for them to come home safely and soon. That's about as far as it can go.
But I cannot claim to support their mission, or to think that they're bending that talent, ability, and professionalism to the proper end.
How can I explain it? Let me try it this way.
We all know (hopefully) that it is the nature of governments to become bigger and more powerful and more oppressive as time goes on. Some become that way quickly, some take centuries; but no government willingly becomes smaller and less powerful and gives liberty back to its people.
Our government is one of the ones that has been becoming bigger and more oppressive for centuries (although mostly since 1912). Every week there's a new liberty it wants to take away. If we can't be shamed into giving up rights "for the chillllldren," then those rights are forcibly taken away on behalf of the War On Drugs. Even the War On Drugs has apparently pretty much served out its usefulness in that regard, so now we have the War On Terror, which gave us the USA PATRIOT Act and the Department of Fatherland Security. (Extra credit: under which branch of government does the
Constitutional prescription for the security of a free state fall? Think about it.)
So far so good. The fly in the ointment is that an armed citizenry can be peacefully oppressed only so far as it is willing to allow itself to be oppressed. Eventually, the government is going to need lots more men with guns to oppress us than it has now--and bigger guns. Toward that end, Baby Bush has for some time now been trying to get the Posse Comitatus Act--which, as I hope most of you know already, prohibits the use of US military forces against American citizens on American soil--abolished. (There's already a chink in the PCA that allows use of military equipment in the War On Drugs--which is why the FBI had to claim the Branch Davidians had a meth lab in order to get armored vehicles from the Army. That's not enough for Baby Bush, though: he wants to eliminate the whole thing.)
When that happens, all that ability and talent and professionalism in the US military is going to be aimed at
me. (If the War On Terror hasn't been superseded by something that's even more efficient at destroying American liberty by that point, I'm sure I'll long since have been defined as a terrorist by then, because I'll own militia weapons that I won't have surrendered.)
And at long last, we come around the mulberry tree to the reason my support of the troops must have its limits. If the people in the military can't see that its mission in Iraq is in direct contravention of the Constitution it swore to uphold and defend, then I can have no confidence that they will see anything wrong with similar orders to come get me and other Americans like me. And I think it's a little presumptuous of all and sundry to expect me to offer unquestioning support to the very people whom I fear may one day try to kill me and my family.
