Down time

Let's hope that every "exhausted" Senator and Representative, who just couldn't wait to get to that much-needed, month-long August "recess," finds the time to read this. From the Guardian Unlimited:

A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. "The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted," says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the "surge" in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: "We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now."

(...)

The anecdotal evidence on the ground confirms what others - prominent among them General Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State - have been insisting for months now: that the US army is "about broken". Only a third of the regular army's brigades now qualify as combat-ready. Officers educated at the elite West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the consequence that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned officers - and the problem is expected to worsen.

It is unforgivable, in my opinion, that the specific people who so blithely chose to start this trumped-up little war would dare to take an extended vacation, instead of staying at their cushy posts in Washington and figuring out, once and for all, how to end this disaster. I don't give a sh#t if it's "tough" on them and their families - it's certainly not half as tough as the job they've imposed on hundreds-of-thousands of their gullible constituents, without adequate training, without available equipment, without a clear objective, without hope of a break that those Americans have truly earned.

As long as American men and women are being killed in the service of this government's illegal, nonsensical, callous, counterproductive, imperialistic fearmongering, then the fearmongerers themselves damn well better be on the job, 24/7, shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers they claim to care so much about. Seems a tad more important than sailing with Daddy in Maine and clearing some more brush on the Crawford dude-ranch.

I mean, just think of the "message that sends to our troops."

If our sons and daughters and lovers and spouses and siblings in uniform don't have the luxury of "down time," then neither should the architects of this crusade that put them in harm's way to begin with. In fact, truth be told, the fecklessness of this entire government - in every area imaginable - has pretty much lost it the right to take any time off for the foreseeable future.

And I think the least we can do is let our elected officials know just that.

Oh well, I'd love to say more, but right now I've got to get back to work myself. Yes, on a summer Sunday. Hey, the family's "suffering" but there are bills to pay. Besides, it's only right that I do whatever I've got to do on this project to not only get it done, but get it done right.

Too bad our "representatives" don't seem to have that same sense of ethical commitment.