You Can't Support the Troops without Supporting the War, But You Can Support the Troops without Supporting Them Financially; Or, On President Bush Opp

I know this argument is waaay out of date, but I hadn't written anything for two months until yesterday, and this has been irking me greatly for that whole time span.

So, I was reading my hometown paper, The [Cleveland] Plain Dealer on Sunday, May 20th, when I came across an interesting little column. I can't remember the author - maybe The New York Times' David Brooks? - but the content was what really mattered. It discussed a piece of legislation that had just passed through the House - HR 1585 - which was an appropriations measure for the Department of Defense. (Read the story from The Army Times here).

According to the story, the HR 1585 allowed for a 3.5% pay raise for military personnel beginning January 1, 2008. It also calls for an additional .5% pay raise for troops over the increase in the private sector for each additional year between 2009 and 2012. Members of the House Armed Services Committee, the group that penned this amendment, felt that "the slightly bigger military raises are intended to reduce the gap between military and civilian pay that stands at about 3.9 percent today. Under the bill, HR 1585, the pay gap would be reduced to 1.4 percent after the Jan. 1, 2012, pay increase" (Military Times article).

Seems reasonable enough and about 4 years too late, right? Well, don't tell that to the Bush administration. Once they heard about this preposterous, un-American measure, they were all over it. The administration called the additional half-percent raise "unnecessary," stating that "When combined with the overall military benefit package, the president’s proposal provides a good quality of life for service members and their families."

Now, instead of expressing his concerns for the additional expenditures - which are estimated to be a whopping $7 billion over the 5 years of the supplemental bill - as he would have done with a GOP-controlled Congress, Bush threatened, yet again, to use his veto pen. Our President, the one who put our troops in Iraq, threatening to veto a military spending bill in large part because he won't consent to more pay for the enlisted.

This is the same administration that thought we could fight the war on the cheap, that bragged about how oil revenues would easily cover the cost of this war. The same administration who, just as they were shipping our boys across the world, was slashing funding to the VA. The same administration who had to beg for an extra $2 billion in 2005 because it underestimated the cost of treating wounded Iraq war vets. The same administration that tried not only to fight increased benefits and pay to troops in 2004, but tried to slash their heath benefits while they were half way across the world.

Now, I am not a big proponent of an immediate withdrawal. I have been sitting on the fence of this issue for quite some time now. I was opposed to the war from the start, but I have been unsure of how to end it. I am coming over the side of a phased re-deployment, however. But regardless of your political affiliation, race, creed, opinion on the war, etc. NO ONE should be undercutting our troops when they are in the middle of the war. Especially not those who claim to be supporting those troops and question the patriotism of everyone else.

Opposing the military pay raise. Yet another example of the Bush administration supporting the troops in public, while stabbing them in the back in reality.

God Bless America. I hope He will at least.