This is a bit of a rambling post. I'm just writing from the heart. No rewrites today.

I am incredibly thankful for the sacrifices those in our armed forces have made to defend our country. There are no words sufficient to repay putting one's blood on the line.

There are those who say that if you oppose the War on Iraq, you're not supporting our troops. They are afraid that unless we all sing along with jingoistic warmongering, somehow our armed forces are weakened. They want to silence Americans and stop dissent. Such is their fear that they turn against the very freedom that America not only represents but presents to the world by example.

What these would-be thought police don't realize is that our freedom to dissent -- in fact, our disagreements themselves -- make us stronger. That freedom is the very essence of what was called "the American experiment" that captured the imaginations of peoples the world over some 200 years ago.

Our soldiers have had to go to war to defend that freedom. Fascism nearly succeeded in World War 2. The grit of, and sacrifices made by, our military men (and back then they were mostly men, save for the support services) helped turn the tide in that war and defeated the greatest threat to freedom we've faced.

During the Cold War, the cooler heads in our military managed to help prevent war against the Soviet Union. Yes, there were skirmishes all over the world, leading to much loss and tragedy. But ultimately it was the peace that won out. We had but to wait, and the Soviet Union crumbled from within. Back then it was appreciated that our armed forces' greatest role was to prevent war.

War is never pretty. Yet many in this country seem to have delusions that war can be conducted surgically, that armies really are just well-armed police forces. That our War on Iraq was planned and launched by a bunch of chicken hawks who all managed to avoid any military service when their time came reveals, perhaps, just how our country managed to get into this mess. In their arrogance, they thought they knew war. They thought they could teach the Army what war was. They ignored the advice of generals. They fired those who disagreed. And they launched recklessly into a situation that they neither comprehended nor knew how to manage.

We've given our troops an impossible task: to police a country divided by centuries of feuds and mistrust between groups bound by fundamentalist religion and ethnic lineage. Armies aren't police, they're conquerers and destroyers and defenders. They blow the crap out of the enemy until victory. The military mission in Iraq ended when they took Baghdad.

But now they aren't allowed to be the Army and Marines. Now they're supposed to be cops. They aren't supposed to annihilate the enemy. They're supposed to keep the peace. They aren't supposed to search and destroy. They're supposed to patrol and protect. And when they take military action, they end up destroying the very people and places they've been put there to protect. That's not their fault, per se. They're military, not SWAT teams. How do you protect a neighborhood when all you have is technology designed and built to destroy?

Our troops are doing their best. Theirs is not the place to question their mission. They've been given a job, and they go do it as best they can.

It's the responsibility of our political leaders that our troops are in this position. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz (who all pulled strings and curried favors to stay out of Vietnam) have put our troops there, distorted their purpose by making them play cop, undermined their code of conduct by making torture part of the program, diminished their safety by flouting international law and the Geneva Conventions, destroyed global trust in their noble cause, all the while thumbing their noses at the American people by lying big lies and daring anyone to call them on it.

Are Bush and company going to suffer for this? Probably not. They'll move on to greater wealth and receive accolades from their sycophants.

Meanwhile our troops, who already are pushed to the limits, will continue to pay the price in their souls. I don't think anyone could go through the emotional rollercoaster of such brutal violence and emerge untouched. And when they come home and find that Bush and the Republican Congress have continued to leave the VA underfunded, and experience benefit cuts, they will learn what "support our troops" really means to those people: support our political agenda, and to hell with the troops.

Few politicians of either party have had any shining moments since 9/11. The political grandstanding has been demagoguery. For a few months, perhaps, our entire nation stood together. But Bush and the Republicans used that to push their own agenda, and while the wrecking of our economy and corruption of the judiciary are bad enough, their bloodiest legacy is the War on Iraq, which first was because Saddam supposedly had a connection with 9/11 (which he didn't), and then because he had WMD (which he didn't), and then because we're going to spread freedom around the globe by military force.

Over 1,600 soldiers have died in Iraq -- most of them during the "peace." And it continues day by day, while they valiantly pursue a mission handed to them that is vague and prevents them from doing what they're trained to do, undermanned, under-equipped, underpaid, and unappreciated by all too many people in this country, on the right and left.

I hear today that Ted Koppel is going to read all the names of the soldiers who've fallen in the past year. That is a tribute that our media and our politicians have avoided. The Bush Administration's effective outlawing of press coverage of the casualties coming home is utterly shameful and dishonors our veterans. The shame, the responsibility, the arrogance, the hubris belong to the chicken hawk administration. They got us into this, unnecessarily -- and unwisely, given the very real threats from al-Qaeda, North Korea and others -- and our young men and women are paying the price.

To the men and women of the armed forces, you have my deepest gratitude.

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