Sherry Chandler » Patience
Patience
On Monday, All Things Considered aired a long interview with Lt. Col. Robbie Robbins who has just spent a year in Iraq training police. Robbins, like most of our troops in Iraq apparently, is committed to the mission:
And most Americans don’t understand how much patience the situation in Iraq requires, Robbins says.
“‘Two steps forward, one step backwards’ is what they told us when we went there. Well, it was sometimes ‘two steps forward, four steps backwards,’” he says.
“You have to go there, you have to live with them, you have to eat with them, then you get a feel for where they’re coming from, why it’s the way it is, and what it’s going to take,” the soldier says.
And yesterday, Mr. Bush himself called for patience in his thickest most pugnacious Texan.
Patience.
Then, Tuesday on Morning Edition, Charles Moskus was complaining that Americans aren’t making any sacrifices for this war. We’re not willing to send our children so we must have a draft to make us send them.
Sacrifice.
As though patience and sacrifice were such cardinal virtues that they must be practiced blindly. Shameful to be impatient for any reason whatsoever. Virtuous to make sacrifices for any nationalist cause.
But when I hear all this excoriation of the American character I think we might all be more patient if this war wasn’t costing us $12 billion a month. If we actually thought this war was helping anybody, if the whole thing hadn’t been a boondoggle, enriching KBR and impoverishing everything else. As for sacrifice, we’re making sacrifices, or having sacrifices made for us.
To quote Digby:
Americans have every right to be sick of this war, for all the reasons we discuss here and all over the country every day. But they have a right to be appalled that we are throwing this gigantic sum of money into that sinkhole too, even as we see Americans dying from …. sinkholes, and all kinds of neglected infrastructure, bad health care, environmental degradation, tainted food supply, natural disasters and a host of other ills that only the government can deal with — and isn’t. Now they are about to start with their tired mantra of “tax and spend,” and insist on cutting even more necessary programs after they’ve run up a trillion dollar debt for an unnecessary war and enriched their defense contractor owners beyond their wildest dreams.
Americans have a right to be angry and have their politicians express that anger for them. This bloody, Iraq money pit is infuriating. There’s nothing shameful about admitting that.
Possibly related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Leave a comment