(Author -- has written published, unpublished academic papers; has long years of newspaper experience, writing daily and magazine editorials, essays, feature articles, columns, novelettes, short stories. Academic, other works -- has degrees in literature and jornalism, masters in development economics, and in civil law; journalist, practicing lawyer, Finance Attache, ASEAN specialist, retired diplomat, and former deputy permanent representative to the United Nations.)Don't Treat Our Soldiers Like Dogs By Sending Them Home With Tails In-Between Their Legs
Edwin A. Sumcad
With a heavy heart, I say this to Sen. Russell Feingold: Our brave men and women in uniform will pay in blood what it takes to defeat the enemy in Iraq. Don’t send them home like beaten dogs with tails in- between their legs.
This verbum sapienti sparked from the essay of a talented but deeply concerned war veteran, writer and creator of the American Infidel in the Internet. [1] His country-mate before they immigrated to America named Felimar Blanco, e-mailed to me the written essay as a reaction to my articles published in the American Chronicle and affiliates on the subject of congressional funding and troop withdrawal.
The pissed off author of “Blame It All On Bush” in American Infidel is a true patriot whose unfaltering loyalty to the fatherland shames our flag-wavers who serve in Congress as well as the military yet attack their own country with a hellish Judas disorder that now like a spreading epidemic infects many of our halfhearted politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, and turns fickle-minded, opinionless Americans into pro-terrorists fifth columns without even knowing it.
I describe this Judas syndrome as kiss first then betray and destroy later.
What is alarming is that there is a pattern of Judas syndrome attacks all over the country. It is driven by narcissism that strongly manifests among those beholden to the god of opportunism. It is a “malignant self-love”, according to Dr. Sam Vaknin in What is Narcissism in some kind of medical report at http://www.toddlertime.com/narcissism/what-is-npd.htm. [2]
For example, some entrepreneurial parents would induce their sons and daughters to join the military so that the military would take good care of their college education. When those young enlisted volunteers are deployed in Iraq, those parents of fortune are on the streets, and like the likes of the Pinkos and Cindy Sheehan bawl their lungs out in protesting the war in Iraq, angrily lashing and tearing the image of the President of the United States into pieces. As Commander-In-Chief, they condemn President Bush for sending their sons and daughters to harms way in Iraq, which according to them, only to be murdered by terrorists.
The worst part of this protest that seems to point to insanity as a primary suspect in the demonstration of this particular aggravation is that when the 24-year old soldier named Casey was killed in combat in Iraq, his mom Sheehan went on tour across the country with her entourage of supporting left-wing radicals, denouncing the government and the Bush administration as “the enemy of humanity”, even calling the President of the United States a “murderer” in the killing of her son in Iraq. If this cannot boggle the imagination of anyone in total disbelief that such vicious slander could be hurled against the President of the United States, nothing on this planet can.
In another similar waterlogged “anti-Bushism”, President Bush has to fire or retire some six or seven generals who jumped into the bandwagon of Bush-bashing when the course of our military operations in Iraq met some rough sailings. I assume by logical inference that it was really nothing personal to President Bush when those generals were either retired or booted out – because that we can see even at a distance -- it was just that these guys were sending the wrong signal to our fighting men and women in uniform and to the enemy in the battlefield, more so when the battle in Iraq intensified after those Syrian and Iranian mercenaries entered into the picture. The difficulties we met became cannon-fodders to Bush-bashers who love to train their exploding cannon tongues at the Bush administration for political gain.
The point to consider seriously in this pulsating hubris of political tragedy is that, suddenly there was money in Bush-bashing, especially in the character-assassination part of the venture. The more hard-hitting the innuendoes are, the more the written venture becomes attractive to the opposition in the market of dissent. Book critiques were selling overnight like hotcakes.
Wantonly criticizing Bush because in the eyes of the beholder the war was poorly managed turned out to be a lucrative profiteering business in commerce that enriched more the already money-awash multi-million-dollar publishing industry in the advent of this millennium.
Thus having said that, it would seem like a dream come true to those retired, hired-and-fired generals to write down their opposition memoirs in the military, and then afterwards decide to go on touring the countryside to promote and sell their published merchandise.
All of these tragic examples out of a truckload in historical memory, demonstrate that those were done not out of love of country but of self – plain and simple narcissism, which Dr. Vaknin described as “malignant love of self”.
In literature, the story behind this is even more tragic. In Metamorphoses, [3] Narcissus spurned Echo, the lovely nymph who had a crush on him, because he believed that his beauty and perfection was unmatched and godlike. In despair and in mortal pain, Echo just “…faded away to nothing but a faint, plaintive whisper…”
Goddess Nemesis taught Narcissus an everlasting lesson. He was doomed to fall in love with his own reflection as he enamored himself in Echo’s pond. And there he was reclining at the edge of the pond forever, wasting away to nonentity by just “staring down into the water” throughout eternity.
In contrast, like our super military guys in Iraq, this webmaster American veteran in American Infidel whose works were sent to me, put his life on the line … a fighter for and a resolute defender of freedom, although by the tenor of his writings, like the majority of veterans, annoyed, and like almost all veterans across the country, is also upset of what the Democrats and the internal enemy in the country that we could not nuke, are doing to our troops in Iraq.
From the very inception of this incredulous historical error of judgment [the pulling out of troops through budgetary strangulation], I meant to ask these questions: What would Feingold and the Democrats do when some 150,000 troops are pulled out of Iraq en masse?
If they are redeployed to other strategic places and ordered to do battle elsewhere as the ruling Democrats in Congress wanted them to do, will they have the will to serve well as they should when they just came out from their telling defeat in Iraq? What use would costly redeployment to Afghanistan and other countries in the Middle East to protect our interest when the fickle-minded Congress opts for another withdrawal because of funding difficulties caused by political bickering as the 2008 presidential election approaches? Wouldn’t that be an exercise in futility if not a tortuous adventure in insanity?
It is not about the purpose of war of which their reassignment to battlefields other than Iraq is justified that matters but the temperament of Congress is what counts as shown in their precipitous exit out of Iraq. With this assume the collateral danger this may bring about that we have to face when the war on terror shifts to the homeland as a result of our Iraq withdrawal, considering that we forfeit the opportunity to fight and defeat the enemy not here where the bloody confrontation may occur, but right there in Iraq where bloodletting to subdue the enemy is the call of the day.
Since the Democrat budget centurions are silent on what to do with our soldiers once they are pulled back and sent home the second time around due to fiscal restraints, and no plan B is on the board, in fact nothing at all is coming out of our radar screen for public scrutiny in this regard, are they going to throw our highly trained war personnel to waste in the streets of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, drive them into dimly-lit gay bars of San Francisco as a way of life, or because of scanty jobs available cross the border to Tijuana for entrepreneurial moonlighting, shady dealings of contrabands, drug lord tail-gating for easy money, clandestine wags and weeds or crowd them in mental health asylums as casualties of war? This is the story of our Vietnam veterans whose dislocation from society has become a tearing and tearful experience that this nation has to bear when it was not prepared to face the consequences of our street-borne defeat in Vietnam.
It speaks of a cranial vacuum and intellectual atrophy of conscience on the part of those who embrace extreme anti-war radicalism to banish our men and women in uniform into this soul-searching predicament and at the bottom of it, into a national tragedy. This reckless and rushed advocacy for troop withdrawal without a backup for structural adjustment – as street urchins say it with conviction -- sucks…!
Our men and women in uniform were trained to fight and live to fight a war in order for this country to bask in the sunshine of freedom and liberty free of threats of external subjugation and foreign domination. To die for our freedom and democracy, and to serve this country with honor, putting their lives on the line 24-hours a day, is the noblest calling and the greatest story of all professions ever told. To suddenly whisk them out of their own world of soldiery, to become misplaced citizens of the country – at least this is what psychologists claim in many cases of dysfunctional war veterans suffering psychosomatic war syndrome – is to say the least, murder!
No one disputes this much: We learned of Schulze, the unwanted war hero, who took his life after he was turned away from two VA hospitals -- in Minneapolis and St. Cloud -- because their psychiatric units were full.
Who really cares about the likes of Schulze in a society that was not ready for those whose lives were recreated from the clay of war to live in a new world of a haunting dream?
This downside is about fear when our soldiers in the thinking of the American Infidel are pulled out of Iraq and treated like dogs with their hind legs hiding their tails as they scamper homeward in defeat. #
© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Access February 5, 2007
