Find a Stranger, Reminisce About How It Used To Be

posted by Bill Arnett @ 11:05 AM Permalink

Another bit of not-so-obvious damage caused to our military and National Guard readiness by the rogue policies of our boy king wanna-be has come to light in a most inconvenient way. I refer to the F5 tornado that hit the ground to cut a 1.7 mile-wide by 22 mile-long swath of destruction in Greensburg, Kansas; the destruction is nearly complete.

Revealed in an excellent piece on the tornado from the AP Huffington Post Wires is a throwaway line that tells much more of a story than the bush maladministration would care for the people of America to know:

The governor said the state's response was limited by the shifting of emergency equipment, such as tents, trucks and semitrailers, to the war in Iraq.…"Not having the National Guard equipment, which used to be positioned in various parts of the state, to bring in immediately is really going to handicap this effort to rebuild," Sebelius said.

Once again America, faced with a humanitarian disaster from natural causes, just as in Katrina (with some obvious differences of course), finds itself unable and unprepared to perform disaster relief work due to a lack of National Guard heavy equipment, now located in Iraq and not within the state it should be, Kansas.

Louisiana lost a city it still has not recovered because of war-mongering and allowing the Treasury to be drained to support the war in Iraq.

National Guard ranks are thinning, with fewer people signing up to serve knowing the Guard is now nothing more than another part of the Army, they will be serving in Iraq for extreme lengths of time, repeatedly in just a few years, along with the large numbers of Guardsmen there now and for the foreseeable future. Soldiers being released from active duty were one of the Guard's best sources for people; those soldiers now prefer to just go home and fight no more.

America's regular military forces are being exhausted and thrown back into combat, even with wounds that should send them home, not back in action.

America has not one single combat-ready brigade on standby for a lack of equipment, training, and manpower. The Navy and the Air Force are having to supplement Army/Marine forces doing jobs for which they never volunteered, such as driving truck and standing guard on the multiple prisons we have in Iraq.

Every time our government screws the troops with inter-service transfers, extended tours, repeated tours in Iraq, a lack of training, a lack of equipment, and a lack of care for the returning wounded, the bush maladministration does incalculable damage to the security of America, as is again shown by the failure to properly supply the National Guard so they can do their primary jobs: disaster relief and homeland security.

For how much longer can America afford to ignore our own people, especially those in disaster zones, and continue with the destruction of our military, our first line of defense? America is more vulnerable than ever to attacks on our shore as the debacle that is Iraq continues to voraciously consume resource after resource that the country cannot replace after the pillaging of our Treasury and the stubborn defiance of a very small man with grandiose delusions of being a "great man" who, almost singe-handedly defeated "terrorism", even though the country suffers as a nation.

No good has or ever will come out of bush's genocidal war against Iraq, no matter how many millions of Iraqi's die at the hand of America and no matter how many Americans suffer from having to do without vital resources that have been commandeered for Iraq.

That's why I say, "Find a stranger, reminisce about how things used to be, before America began withering and dying at the hands of its own president and his political sycophants."

Labels: Bush, corruption, Iraq war