Over and over and over again

Most always, it is the New York Times, or more exactly, something I read in that venerable newspaper, that sets me off on a new entry. Today, it was a front page piece on the stress multiple tours is putting on soldiers that are serving in Iraq. 

Big surprise there, like sending them back, time after time, would leave them feeling all fuzzy and warm and safe and comfortable. The numbers of men and women suffering this form of passive torture are staggering. According to the Times, "out of 513,000 active-duty soldiers who have served in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, more than 197,000 have deployed more than once, and more than 53,000 have deployed three or more times, according to a separate set of statistics provided this week by Army personnel officers."

EEEEEKKKKK!!!! That's like putting someone in the electric chair every day and then saying, oh, not today...... how inhumane is that?

During WWII, soldiers fought until they had a certain number of "points". During Vietnam, like I stated in the post before this one, it was not a points system. You served 365 days..... one year, then it was back to the states, and usually a discharge. Today, it's go and come home, and go and come home, and go and come home until possibly your term of service has ended. That could mean a person would be in harm's way for longer than WWII lasted. 

I'd love to be one of those people who believes that the personnel of the Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force could pull out of Iraq in the middle of the night and quietly let the people there put their country back together. But truth be told, it can't happen like that. And as long as we have a military presence there the attacks against US forces will continue, and Sunni tribesmen will still be killing their Shite countrymen. The later could go on for decades. Whatever you say about Saddam Hussein, he kept the peace, albeit with an over zealous iron fist. Peace between these two tribes could go on for decades. I have no idea how to bring them together, because men who are zelot-like about different beliefs don't come together very easily. Just look at Palestine and Israel. That region of the world has been at war, in some way, for centuries. 

I say, bring back the draft and then whoever is in that big white elephant in Washington will have to think of a way to get US troops out of this mess, and get the two dominate tribes in Iraq to agree on a way to live in peace, or suffer the terrible consequences US forces bring upon them and their land everyday. Oh, wait.... I forgot about the oil men in this country want control of. 

So, scratch the get the troops out sooner thing. Halliburton wants more blood for oil. It keeps those fat cats rich and happy at the expense of the poorer classes of people in this not so great land that is the United States of Amerika. Let's hear it for CEO salaries that resemble the entire budgets of some third-world countries. Don't you love that Lawrence J. Ellison of software giant Oracle got a salary boost of nearly 109 percent. He made a little over 61 million dollars last year. Yep, this war will go on so boys can have all the toys and houses and cars they want.