Progressive Wednesday

It’s so much more than money, but it’s money, too.

3,927 American soldiers have died serving us during Operation Iraqi Freedom (also known as the illegal occupation of Iraq). 477 American soldiers have died serving us during Operation Enduring Freedom (also know as the War in Afghanistan). This is a greater loss than anything that can be calculated in dollars and cents. This is a loss that devastates entire towns, devastates small families in the most urban and most rural patches of America, devastates husbands, wives, children met and those, even more tragically, never met.

According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the current national debt is $9,210,856,011,325.78. So you don’t have to count the digits between commas, let me just tell you that that’s 9 trillion freaking dollars.

Why mention this last statistic? Check this mother out from the Congressional Research Service and Office of Management and Budget Data: In 2007 dollars, the illegal occupation of Iraq and the War in Afghanistan have cost American taxpayers $695.7 billion. How does that compare to other wars fought by this here United States of America? Well, I wouldn’t ask this question without answering it myself, my friends:

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To be perfectly honest, I’ve lost sight of the answer, but I’ll offer this one up: if we come to the United Nations with humility instead of hubris, maybe we can get a peacekeeping force in Iraq. Maybe. Maybe, maybe, if we come to the United Nations with diplomacy instead of despicability, we can get a hand in Afghanistan against the Taliban, since they still hold so much power and influence:

Attacks by the Taliban in Afghanistan surged last year, according to previously unpublished figures from allied military forces fighting insurgents.

Statistics compiled by the multinational International Stabilisation Force in Afghanistan show attacks on international troops and the Afghan government have gone up by between a fifth and a third.

Maybe we can do something. Call your Senators (just click here). Call your Representatives (just click here to get your full 9-digit zip code, then just click here). Demand that we go to the U.N. and ask for the help we require. It makes a difference. It does.

As American as– ¦

Apple pie, amber waves, baseball, hot dogs, the Fourth of July, SUVs, the iPod, Reader's Digest, and comic books. While not all of these are synonymous with the good old red, white, and blue, they are all things have become a part of everyday life for many of us residing somewhere between “sea– and “shining sea.– For better (baseball and Reader's Digest) or for worse (SUV's and hot dogs), we have come to think of many of these things as essential, and we even take them for granted.

There are many Americans who would love to take these things for granted like the rest of us, but for whom that becomes harder and harder with each bullet that flies by their head and with each roadside bomb that sends them diving for cover under their improperly-armored vehicle. I speak, of course, about our troops.

At Progressive Wednesday, we're not the kind of Patriots that drive around with yellow ribbon magnets on our car that say, “Support Our Troops.– We want them home, pronto, and until they're home, we search for ways actually make their lives easier and safer. In March, we dedicated a Wednesday to doing things that actually support our troops; you can check it out here.

In our searches we have come across a website dedicated to just that. The appropriately named, HereInReality.com has compiled a list of organizations and programs that make it easy for those of us who don't risk our lives for others with every step to help out those who do. Some cost a few bucks, some a few minutes, and some just ask you to utilize a small talent. From baking cookies, to donating a magazine subscription, or even fostering the pet of a deployed troop, they make it as easy as, well, apple pie.

It's important that our troops get a taste of home, that they can step away from the constant surrealism of war and bury their nose in a book, or remember what's it's like to bite into Grandma's cookies, until they can do it once again in the comfort of Grandma's kitchen.

So skip on over to HereInReality.com. Then see what you can do to improve the lives of those who have sacrificed so much to help improve ours.

Picture thanks to this fine baker

“The only alternative to coexistence is co-destruction.”

We recently expressed our concerns about the potential for a war in Iran – the feds seem to be drumming it up with their “all options on the table” language about what they’d do to prevent Iran from creating nuclear weapons. (If you haven’t already, please join us and sign this petition from StopIranWar.com, which is sponsored by VoteVets.org and Wesley Clark.) And we’ve also addressed our desire for the Congress to de-authorize the occupation of Iraq. So what do the two have to do with each other? We’re terrified of what would happen, both there and here, if we were to, in any way, attack another sovereign nation when we’re unprovoked, creating another “war” of choice through preemptive strikes.

This one of the reasons we’ve already touted the efforts of groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War: they know, firsthand, what’s going on in Iraq; we, the prime-time-news-viewing public, do not. So we were impressed by this kind of powerful, in-your-face performance, c/o the Utne Reader:

Four years after the US invaded Iraq, a group of the war’s veterans invaded the streets of New York. In a Memorial Day exercise, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) donned their gear and reenacted military scenarios commonplace in the streets of Iraq. Using their hands as rifles, they shouted commands and crept around corners. Some scoured the streets for “Iraqi citizens,” forcing them to the ground, cuffing, and hooding them.

And here’s the video of the performance — imagine if this actually happened in the United States, imagine how you’d feel:

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And here’s our modest two-part proposal:

1. Let’s stop the Iran War in it’s horrific tracks. We’re going to beat this one home, so you might as well go sign the petition pronto. And please consider sending this letter to your members of Congress. Combined, you’ll spend about 120 seconds. That seems like a commercial break well spent.
2. Check your wallet or purse. Do you have a fiver? Good. Let’s donate that Lincoln, that half of a movie, that combo McMeal — let’s donate those bucks to Iraq Veterans Against the War. They’ll put it to good use. Trust us.

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Editor’s Note, Part I: To see the videos we’ve previously recommended to better understand what our troops are going through, click here and here.

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Editor’s Note, Part II: The title of this entry comes to us from Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of the Republic of India. He was mentored by Mahatma Gandhi.

The occupation of Iraq occupies our cops.

The occupation of Iraq, besides taking the lives of 3,511 American soldiers, besides taking the lives of Iraqi civilians, besides costing American taxpayers like you and like me $436 billion (which is climbing by $200 million each day), the occupation of Iraq might be boosting crime here. Read for yourself:

The prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have put pressure on the National Guard, whose citizen-soldiers can be called away from civilian jobs for months or years at a time to fight beside regular soldiers in war zones.

About 16 percent of the 182,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are members of the National Guard.

But here’s where we get to the smaller bite out of crime:

Communities across America have been especially hard-hit by the deployment of some 24,000 police officers since September 11, 2001. Police officers make up 5.1 percent of the National Guard and military reserve.

Repeated deployments to war zones do more than mess with police schedules — the loss of just one officer can devastate a small town, where police forces are shoestring operations and the jobs of the town’s “first responders” often overlap.

Because so many of our brave boys and girls in blue are fighting unnecessarily in Iraq, police departments do less patrols and less community outreach. And because, “by law, employers must leave a Guard member’s job open while the worker is deployed,” police departments are struggling to fill slots temporarily. Why? Because the kinds of folks who become cops are also the kind of folks who join the military. And because training and recruitment take time, money, and people, and many of those people are, go figure, in Iraq.

So, we’re going to remind you about the Wednesday we wrote recently called “Memorial Day, Everyday,” which includes five ways we can help bring a peaceful and successful end to the occupation of Iraq, convince others this can truly happen, and aid our returning soldiers in the process.

Picture c/o this photographer.

This Wednesday: Memorial Day Everyday

Problem:

Yes, yes, yes, dear readers, I realize that Memorial Day was “celebrated” on Monday, but there’s two things to consider: first, Memorial Day is actually today, May 30, we just “observed” it on Monday; second, it seems odd to us that we’d remember those who’ve died in the name of our country for only 24 hours, if that. The majority of us, yours truly included, spent the vacation day gobbling bratwurst and watching baseball on the idiot box.

So, this Wednesday, this Memorial Day Wednesday, we’re going to do something for the troops so they needn’t just be in our memories.

But that’s not the biggest problem we’re facing today. Today, we’re facing a continuation of our senseless occupation of Iraq. On Friday, May 25, I realized, once again, why I belong to no political party: politicians aren’t listening to the people, the 9/11 Commission, the Iraq Study Group, or the rest of the free and not-so-free world. The Democratically controlled Congress and the Republican president just agreed to legislation to continue funding our occupation of Iraq with no end in sight (I suppose “never” is technically a time, but it’s rather far off).

An occupation can only end two ways: annexation or withdrawal. Since we’d rather have Puerto Rico or the District of Columbia as the 51st state, we’re calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

Opponents of a troop withdrawal, the few that remain, may say that to do so will destabilize the region. I’m fairly certain — if there’s any accuracy to the news we’re streamed every day — that the region is pretty well destabilized. I’m fairly certain that those destabilizing the region either despise us, fear us, or are us. But in none of those cases does that mean the Iraqis want to listen to us, particularly if what they’re hearing is mortar shells and machine guns and violent knocks on their doors. Opponents of withdrawal (which I suppose means they want to add Iraq as a state) also spew things like: “If we don’t fight the terrorists there, we’ll fight them here.” Seeing as the vast majority of terrorists don’t live in Iraq, I’m pretty sure our 160,000 troops in that country aren’t actually not fighting many of the world’s terrorists.

Let’s get something straight and straighten out our diction: we are not mired in a “civil war.” We are mired in an occupation of a sovereign country, a country of approximately 27,500,000 people. And we’ve slaughtered at least 64,333 of those civilians[1] for no ties to 9/11, for no ties to weapons of mass destruction, for no semblance of a peaceful democracy.

And the potential blowback from our occupation is rather terrifying. Blowback — not our freedoms, not our wealth, not our (somewhat) equal treatment of women, and not even our McRestaurants — caused 9/11. If we want peace on our land and on others, the sooner we withdraw, the better. We want the world community to respect us, and this is best achieved through a good example (and not imposing), through peace, through fair trade, through humanitarian missions and actions.

So let�s let logic rule this Memorial Day Wednesday. It’s time that we at Progressive Wednesday — our valiant staff and our dedicated readers — take a stand.

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Make Progress:

3,454 American troops have died because of our occupation of Iraq. And here’s another sobering factoid: “In the period from Memorial Day 2006 through Saturday, 980 soldiers and Marines died in Iraq, compared to 807 deaths in the previous year.”

On top of that ugly fact — with 114 American casualties in Iraq this month, May 2007 becomes the third deadliest month since the occupation began, and the highest total deaths since November 2004. In other words, our time in Iraq is getting worse.

So our goal this here Wednesday is simple: let us help bring an end to this mess as soon as possible, and let us properly remember those who’ve fought in our name. Can we? We can. Enough said.

Let’s put away the ketchup and mustard, let’s put the volleyball nets back in the shed, let’s put the kids to bed, and let’s do something. Let us all — united together by the name of our country and our shared values — do something powerfully patriotic.

• Salute
• Watch
• Read
• Sign
• End

[1] And at least hundreds of these deaths could have been avoided. But we insisted on using cluster munitions, and “50 strikes on top Iraqi leaders failed to kill any of the intended targets.”

Memorial Day Everyday: Salute

Salute:

We believe the best tribute to our sisters and brothers — those soldiers who’ve served and lived and those we, as a country, have laid to rest — is to help end the occupation of Iraq. As such, we’d like to point you to a fantastic organization trying to do just that: Iraq Veterans Against the War. If you want to help convince the paltry number of those around who think we should stick it out in Iraq with no end in sight, check out IVAW’s webpage for information — they outline it in a pithy and powerful way.

The IVAW calls for the following:

• Immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq;
• Reparations for the destruction and corporate pillaging of Iraq so that Iraqi people can control their own lives and future; and
• Full benefits, adequate health care (including mental health), and other supports for returning servicemen and women.

We�re not sure if we could agree more. And what does the IVAW do? Four biggies include:

1. Educating the public about the occupation of Iraq through speaking engagements and by contacting the media.
2. Speaking to classrooms about the realities of being a soldier.
3. Supporting “Conscientious Objectors and others facing military prosecution for their refusal to fight.”
4. Pushing for “full funding for the Veterans Administration, and full quality health treatment (including mental health) and benefits for veterans when they return from duty.”

We still haven’t heard anything to disagree with. There are plenty of other organizations fighting to end this occupation. But we think this one has more umph than some of the others. So, here’s the deal: just give five. That’s it. Just give five measly smackers to a fantastic organization doing what those of us without military service can’t do: tell the absolute truth about war. Give by clicking this sentence.

On behalf of our troops, thank you in advance.

Memorial Day Everyday: Watch

Watch:

My hombres and mujeres, if you’re somehow not convinced this occupation must end, or if you are convinced but want more fuel for your intellectual and emotional fire, just watch any of the three videos below:

See how well America Halliburton America mistreats our soldiers:

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See the faces of men preparing to return to “normal” lives:

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See a veteran share a shocking recount of his experience in Iraq:

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To see, once again, what our soldiers go through every day, just click this sentence. Please don’t look away. And please remember what you see and hear: that’s true memorializing.