Words, Now... Action?

Joe Biden is pissed.

It's great to see this sort of debate and passion on the Senate floor about the Iraq War. Hopefully it will be followed up with actions that befit the fiery words.

"Are we gonna break this man and woman's army? What are we gonna do here? How many times are we going to ask those 175,000 to rotate, three, four, five, six, seven times?"

This is one of the key points in this issue which I wrote about here. The fact that there US Ground Forces were barely at strength to embark on this excursion and have since been stretched paper thin in four years (along with the National Guard, much to the detriment of states which depend on them almost annually) has seemingly never been recognized by the architects of this current course we're on. Not only is there a question of the Army and Marines breaking on an operational level, but there is the question of the individuals breaking down on multiple levels, and, after being deigned unfit to serve, simply dumped back into society with no support system in place to help them reorient themselves and deal with the crippling physical, mental and emotional aftereffects of their experience in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Instead of working to fix the broken support system, the current administration is focusing on luring more young men and women into the system in order to feed them into the abbatoir that is the Civil War in Iraq and the front against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Were anything to happen in another part of the world that the US would traditionally respond to (in its imperialistically minded fashion) it would be nigh on impossible to put an effective force in place, because such a force does not exist. If there is another terrorist attack on par with 9/11 the super intelligence machine that is the FBI/CIA/NSA would come up with someone that they could plausibly point a finger at and then go in and bomb the Hell out of them, but then there would be no one to send in after the bombing to shoot at the rubble and see if there were any survivors to send off to undisclosed locations for "interrogation". Even now, there aren't enough forces available for the newest surges to be implemented efficiently. More often than not, new fresh troops are not introduced into either Iraq or Afghanistan because they don't exist. Previously deployed forces are merely moved from one theater to another, or their deployments are simply extended with no regard to the physical and mental strain put on the military personnel.

Let's hope we see some action to back up this passion. Politics can not play a part in anything the Congress does to address this situation, as it did here and here. Only a sense of empathy with their fellow men and women who have been tasked with a nigh on impossible mission, as well as the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose lives have been ended or shattered by this seemingly endless, ill-advised and now unjustified (WMDs? NOT!, Iraq-Al Qaeda connection? NOT!) occupation, can drive them to do what is necessary.