I was reading the website of the hatemonger Fred Phelps the other day. He’s the preacher that made a name for himself by going and protesting outside the funerals of gays and lesbians like Matthew Shepard and Diane Whipple.

Well, now it seems that Mr. Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church have new targets. He and his followers have begun to picket the funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq and protest outside the hospitals where the injured and maimed soldiers are receiving treatment.

Let’s get one thing clear--I don’t support the reasons that Bush and his minions used to involve us in this war. I don’t support that we went into a sovereign nation on false pretenses and are now mired in a civil, religious war.

I am sickened, however, that these people would target our troops with their hatred. As the daughter of a career military officer, I have nothing but respect for the job our folks are doing over there.

The military serves our nation. We are a strong democracy because we have people willing to sacrifice everything to keep us safe. They go where they are told and they make the best of bad situations to fulfill their mandate and get out alive.

We’ve seen their ingenuity in the homemade armor they made for their vehicles. Vehicles that Rumsfield and other’s knew only needed a little work to save lives and limbs of the occupants but didn’t think it was a priority to make them available to our troops overseas.

We’ve seen their bravery in fighting in an urban setting where the enemy is just as likely to set up in a mosque as in a building of families. We’ve constrained them with rules of engagement that require them to have positive identification in a war where few enemy combatants wear uniforms, where civilian vehicles loaded with explosives are detonated regularly, and where the collecting of dead bodies is hazardous because so many are being booby trapped with bombs. There is no good way to tell who is an enemy, who is innocent, and who is an accomplice.

We’ve seen from the pictures of Abu Ghraib what the stress of this war will do to normally upstanding citizens. I don’t want to tar everyone with the same brush nor condone the actions of those implicated but we should remember that it is the civilian leaders who have justified the use of torture and created the very situation that led to naked men being led around by leashes.

The military follows the orders of the commander in chief. Since Bush proclaimed Mission Accomplished there have been over 2100 Americans killed. That figure doesn’t include the number of Americans physically and mentally injured nor the number of civilians harmed, which some estimate at three times the rate of that for Americans.

None of those that rushed us to war seem to have taken into account the lessons of guerrilla warfare first taught to us in Vietnam and hammered home in Somalia and Afghanistan. We went in without a way to win the hearts and minds. We have sown the wind and are now reaping the whirlwind. Instead of our being able to show the Iraqi people that supporting us will improve their lives, we’ve made them worse off than they were under Hussein. Hospitals are grievously under supplied and undermanned. Electricity wildly fluctuates and many blocks get running water for only a couple hours a day. Food shortages are common and there is an entire generation that is growing up without an education in anything but violence and brutality.

Lao Tzu stated in his treatise The Art of War, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will never be defeated.” In this, we have failed miserably. The Bush team tried to associate Iraq with the events of September 11, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They ignored information about weapons of mass destruction and provided incomplete reports of this to the country and to our allies. Whenever the intelligence didn’t support their worldview, they conducted a smear campaign against the providers. They ignored the military experts that told them that the numbers of soldiers they requested was too few, the projected cost too low and the plan too vague.

The war is costing us billions of dollars, thousands of lives and a hundred years of goodwill. Our involvement in Iraq isolates us from our allies and gives comfort to our enemies. Hussein, for all his faults, did not tolerate the Taliban or Al-Qaeda operating in his sphere of influence. Removing him has unleashed Shiite militias to wage a campaign of terror against all who oppose their declaration of jihad bis saif including less extreme members of their own faith and international aid workers.

Someone needs to pay for these mistakes and not just our military. Come the midterm elections of 2006 and the presidential election of 2008, we need to hold those responsible accountable with our votes and make the necessary changes to our policies abroad.

Support our troops. Bring them home.

“What difference does it make to the dead...whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
Mahatma Gandhi