I think we should honor the men and women in service by dealing with the truth, so that more people are not sent needlessly to wars that leave them mentally or physically destroyed or dead. And also so that when we do need to take up arms, people in the world know that we are thinking about benefitting humanity and are following are principles and not chucking them aside as inconvenient.

Secondly, Liberating Iraq is not that cool dude! Just ask the Iraqis: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/14_03_08iraqpollmarch2008.pdf

see this poll by ABC and BBC.

In service of truth, please look at the poll.

72% of iraqis oppose our presence there. 70% think we’ve done a somewhat or very bad job there. Converselely, the “Awakening Councils” ie Iraqi warlords, have a 56% approval rating - Oh if only our army had an approval rating as high as unelected warlords!

Seventy something percent of Iraqis want us to leave either “right away” or after security is restored.

59% of Iraqis think that their kids will have either a “worse” or “about the same” quality of life as they had under Saddam. Wow we are doing well.

But maybe we know better than them, sitting in the United States. We know what’s best for them right. Just like the British knew what was best for the American colony (wrong) and other colonies (also wrong)?

Aren’t we shining the light of democracy and liberty around the world? If so, shouldn’t we listen to the people who we are supposed to be delivering liberty to? Even Colin Powell believes that one of the biggest mistakes of the Bush regime was that it didn’t listen “as well as it could have” - here’s the transcript of Colin talking: http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:JqZa7pdY06oJ:www.uga.edu/ruskcenter/pdfs/sostranscript.pdf+University+of+Georgia+albright+powell+baker+transcript&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a

And by the way, he also believes (along with the last 4 secretaries of state), that we should engage Iran diplomatically in a serious way.

So - liberation is great, but who are we doing it for? If we are to help other people to become liberated it seems that they should be the ones who are leading the charge, and calling the shots.

Oh world war II was the last war that we really fought honestly and justly (except for hiroshima and nagasaki)

Oh yeah, and in Panama, we only liberated ourselves from the problem of a drug dealing dictator who we had supported for AT LEAST A DECADE, despite that he used death squads to take care of his political opponents. Can we really say that we are so noble after liberating a country from a problem that we helped to create as we meddled with their sovereignty?

Memorial day should be about respecting the desire of our troops to serve our country and humanity, not blind parroting of the deeds of our sometimes unjust foreign policy.

It’s Food for thought.

have a good one, and may god bless all people and not just those who happen to have the good fortune of being born in the USA

Robby