I read this story at the lovely Al Jazeera today, a story that I have not yet seen anywhere else:

US troops call for Iraq pullout

More than 200 men and women from the US armed services have joined a protest calling for American troops in Iraq to be brought home, organisers say.

The soldiers said they did not think it was worth their while to be in Iraq and questioned the use of repeated tours of duty.

The campaign, called the Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq, takes advantage of defence department rules allowing active duty troops to express personal opinions to politicians without fear of retaliation.

The appeal posted on the campaign’s website at www.appealforredress.org said: “As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq.

You can read the rest at Al Jazeera

We could perhaps criticize the soldiers for not going all the way, risking full-on court martial and the whole lot, but I wouldn’t expect anyone with a family to do that, it’s just… far too self-sacrificing to be done by Americans on a wide scale. What they’re doing instead is intelligently speaking through a loophole that has been used before, effectively. If this picks up steam, it could get interesting, that is if anyone knows about it. Like I said above, I haven’t seen this story ANYWHERE but on Al Jazeera, so perhaps it’s being successfully buried by “teh mna.”

Regardless, what I want to get at is… if a few soldiers with brains can do this, where the hell is everyone else? This is an easy thing to do, the soldiers know the system, how it works, and they’re using it to their advantage. While they’re not fully refusing to co-operate – I can sort of understand that due to the reasons I spelled out above – this is at least something that piques my interest. These are average soldiers – nothing could ever be more media-friendly. But watch the media try to pull an Ann Coulter and bend the story into something ridiculous and insulting and full of glitz and mega-sports-channel style election graphics that somehow convinces Average Joe American (though, givent the current hemmorhage of stupidity in the US media the past couple of days, that may not happen). Or worse yet it just… won’t be reported on. At all. That’s what I’m betting on. We’ll see what happens.

Combine it with despair-filled articles like this, and maybe something good will happen for a change?

(sorry to push things down with yet more American news, but this is fun stuff! C’mon! Maybe I’ll post some retarded Canadian news soon. There’s plenty of it going around right now.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 6:20 am and is filed under Politricks, Yes yes yes!.