Thank you for your service. My younger family members who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan have expressed similar feelings/thoughts about loyalty, nation building and the "peaceful religion".
That being said, those of us from the Nam era seem to be more "zoned in" to the differences between discussions of policy/"hindsight" examination of war VS propaganda used to "degrade" the participants to obtain an objective....
Mr Trump is participating in the latter type of discussion as was used by people like Genghis Khan Kerry.
Trump can (and should) discuss why he would (or wouldn't) have gone into Afghanistan (or Iraq) to give us an idea of how he would act as President.....but calling Bush (and others) LIARS that sent men out to die for personal reasons (or no reason at all).....is guttersnipe propaganda being used for his OWN political agenda like that used in the past to attack our troops.
As an old dog like me who lived through the Nam years....Trump knows better than to go that route....which tells me a LOT about what kind of man he is
Welcome Home.
One of the primary reasons I find this revisionist state of affairs so irritating and offensive is that I have seen it before.
I watched this in the aftermath of the Vietnam war, where people in the media and government were given free reign to disparage the men who served, and their mission.
There are plenty of reasons to disagree with the fundamental mission our men have been involved in, but their mission was to do their job, to the best of their ability, when we, as a country asked them to do so, and the vast majority did that, and with honor.
I watched firsthand how our men were treated by their countrymen while fighting over there, and how they were treated coming home. I hated and despised it, but I was weak, like many others were who felt as I did, and I said nothing. I allowed that to happen by remaining silent.
I vowed never to do that again, and I won’t. I can disagree with the execution of the plan, the money spent, the equipment used, the politics involved, and even the justification, but the men who served did what they were told and kept the faith.
George W. Bush may not have held a rifle in his hands or slept on the ground next to the treads of a tank, but the execution of his job took its toll on him just as surely as it did on many who he sent into combat.
I get the impression many who served with him as CIC understood that.
Thanks for the reply.
GWB fought to end “racial profiling” of Arab Americans as a pre 9-11 candidate, whitewashed Saudi involvement in 9-11, kept spouting that Religion of Peace hogwash while he was President, gave us the Patriot Act and the Iraq invasion as answers to 9-11 when confronting Islam was the correct and uncomfortable answer, and bungled the post victory handling of Iraq.
So how do you reconcile those faults with the enthusiastic support he got at the time, especially from the Troops? America had been attacked, and we always rally around the leader, I think he genuinely loved the troops and that feeling was returned, and at the time it was still a matter of “GWB or the Leftists”.
The whole “Us or the Left” argument has kept American conservatives in thrall for many, many years. Much of the conservative leadership puts globalist and international business interests ahead of American interests, and they use the bogey man of the American Left to frighten and silence conservatives who dare to question that agenda.
Witness the shrill efforts on this thread to tie Trump to Code Pink. Any questioning of the motives of Bush, the idea of nation building as a military objective, or the willingness to avoid offending Arabs and Islam at the cost of national security means that you are an ally of Code Pink? It’s an unthinking smear.
Also, any policy that self destructs at the end of a term due to unpopularity is by definition a failed policy. We can point fingers at Obama all we want, and be right in doing so, but if we fail to recognize the policies of GW Bush as the fathers of the election of Obama, we are fooling ourselves.
I’m sure GWB manipulated and controlled information in order to justify the invasion of Iraq, rather than confront Islam as a whole, and the source of the support of the 9-11 hijackers (his buds, the Saudis). In Washington DC they call it nuance, in the schoolyard we called it lying.
Trump is many things, but he’s not a DC insider, and he doesn’t like DC nuance. We are flummoxed by Trump because we can’t get beyond the old labels of left and right, and he doesn’t fit either one.