Those who fight on the side of truth, right, and justice

A year ago, my Support Our Troops magnet was swiped from my car. Even though I had always intended to replace it, I never did.

After learning about the massacre – let’s not put a “pretty” name on it, we all know what it was – at Haditha, I’m glad I saved that $5.99. The reason is simple: I can’t support our troops anymore.

I have never understood or trusted the reasons we were in Iraq. The case for war was made too quickly, and the line of the administration was that if you weren’t with us, you must support terrorism. I guess with that logic, I suppose that the 28% approval rating justifies the tapping of everyone’s phones. However, as much as I didn’t support the reasons we were there, I supported the men and women who were being sent to the front of the “War on Terror.” Being a “Navy Junior,” I understood that even if you don’t agree with the mission and its reasoning, you trust that your Commander in Chief is working with the best knowledge and has the best of intentions in sending the troops wherever they’re going. You also trust that missions will be conducted with the utmost respect for civilian life and that anyone who doesn’t respect that will be dealt with in the proper way.

Unfortunately, though that may have been the case at the beginning, the incident at Abu Ghraib Prison, the “accidental” bombing of the Golden Mosque, the massacre at Haditha, the shootings of pregnant women, and the subsequent cover-ups of each have shown that throughout the course of the war, the lines have been blurred to the point that it’s impossible to tell who, exactly, are the “terrorists.”

When Abu Ghraib went to trial, the usual line was “I was just following orders.” There’s no telling what the excuses for Haditha will be, but possible candidates include:

• I wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place


• I was angry over my comrade’s death


• We feared for our own lives.

It’s the last excuse that I find the hardest to believe. If it were a house full of adults, I may have been able to stomach it. But these were children. I don’t care how “angry” or “afraid for your life” you are, you don’t shoot a child. Shooting children and photographing the adults in a sexual manner make the people who do this in the name of the United States of America no better than the gang of 19 who executed September 11 in the name of Allah.

Five days after Pearl Harbor, former First Lady Grace Coolidge said, “…it will be a long hard conflict that will call for the utmost effort from every one of us but we cannot doubt that the forces which have truth and right and justice on their side will win.” Right now, I’m not sure which forces – the Americans or the insurgents – those are, and until I know, I won’t be supporting either.