Monday, June 11, 2007
I pity the soldiers
Okay, I admit it, the headline is designed to enrage - I can hear "We don't need your pity!" echoing down the blogosphere now.
However, I was thinking about this last night. What's worse than you having to do extra work because someone else made a mistake? When it happens to me, I just spend all my time thinking about how it's the person who made the mistake that should be correcting it.
Multiply this feeling by about a thousand, and you probably have the feeling that I would have if I was a soldier in Iraq. Someone high up decided to abandon the Iraqi army and Ba'athist party, and now thousands us soldiers and civilians are paying the price with their lives, through no fault of their own. And lets not forget that the war was caused by incorrect intelligenc. The soldiers are having all this trouble in Iraq fighting an enemy that was (is?) armed by their own country, under the false pretence that it is solving the problem of terrorism - as if.
And it will happen again. Take China, a non-democratic country with as much morality as Saddam Hussian with bird flu. At the moment, America loves it, and American companies help it go about it's daily business of restricting free speech and locking up disidents. However, give it a few decades and the poor soldiers will have to go in and risk their lives for the whim of their leaders, all because it suits the current leaders to play along.
Still, it's the soldiers choice, even if I can't understand why they'd want to do it.
However, I was thinking about this last night. What's worse than you having to do extra work because someone else made a mistake? When it happens to me, I just spend all my time thinking about how it's the person who made the mistake that should be correcting it.
Multiply this feeling by about a thousand, and you probably have the feeling that I would have if I was a soldier in Iraq. Someone high up decided to abandon the Iraqi army and Ba'athist party, and now thousands us soldiers and civilians are paying the price with their lives, through no fault of their own. And lets not forget that the war was caused by incorrect intelligenc. The soldiers are having all this trouble in Iraq fighting an enemy that was (is?) armed by their own country, under the false pretence that it is solving the problem of terrorism - as if.
And it will happen again. Take China, a non-democratic country with as much morality as Saddam Hussian with bird flu. At the moment, America loves it, and American companies help it go about it's daily business of restricting free speech and locking up disidents. However, give it a few decades and the poor soldiers will have to go in and risk their lives for the whim of their leaders, all because it suits the current leaders to play along.
Still, it's the soldiers choice, even if I can't understand why they'd want to do it.
