How the Anti-War Brigade Dishonors U.S. Troops

Massachusetts Daily Collegian: No yellow ribbons here by Thomas Naughton

Perhaps some readers will understand why my friends and I rip yellow ribbon "support the troops" magnets off of cars or wherever people have affixed them. By ripping off these ribbons, we find a way to deal with our guilt, as though with each ribbon swiped we take back a life that was taken by this senseless war started by our senseless president and those who support him. . . . We say, "support the troops" so that we won't feel guilty about saying "no" to war. We reason that if we say that we support the troops, somehow we aren't monsters for not saying a word when the death tolls of U.S. soldiers climbed above 1,000. Those ribbons are yellow for a reason, they are not the mark of armed forces support, they are the mark of cowards. Pundits on the radio advise their cowardly listeners to approach men and women in army uniforms and say "thank you." I cannot do that. Every time I pass a person in uniform I look long and hard at them and all I can think inside to say is "I'm so sorry." I want to apologize to them, to their families and to their friends. I feel sorry that we, the people, couldn't control our own government at the outset of this conflict when most of us knew deep inside that it was a mistake.

Put aside for a moment the childish vandalism of Thomas Naughton, and the audacity he displays in determining who gets to express what opinion. Anti-war narcissists like Naughton never consider the possibility that the U.S. military he claims to support actually wants to be in Iraq, actually wants to bring peace and democracy to Iraq. Instead, he can only analyze the entire situation through his biased and misguided prism of liberalism. U.S. troops need a visual and vocal showing of support and appreciation. What they don't need is petty self-flagellation, sympathy, or apologies. A new democracy is being born in a part of the world that knows nothing of democratic principles, a part of the world that has spent decades under the heavy boot of a murderer. All this Naughton calls "a mistake." Ask those who finally were able to express their voice in public without being threatened, tortured, or killed if their vote was a "mistake." Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis faced death-threats on themselves and their families to stand in line and vote. Terrorists (or "insurgents" as the morally indecisive media calls them) are being destroyed. An entire infrastructure in Iraq is being rebuilt. Despite the many accomplishments in Iraq and Afghanistan, Naughton et al knows only negativity, especially if that negativity casts a Republican President in the shadows. This is the ultimate tragedy of anti-war do-gooders: even while they shout, demonstrate, and sloganeer, they fail to realize that they are doing much more harm than good.