I Love a Parade

Today is Memorial Day eve, but it's already Memorial Day in Afghanistan. President Obama spent time visiting with the troops still there, hopefully to bolster their morale. That must be a tough job. Many of these soldiers have had multiple tours of duty, the suicide rate of active duty servicemen and women is shockingly high, and the state of care for veterans has been shown to be appallingly deficient. The remaining Afghanistan mission is as cloudy and ill-defined as it was when President Bush stumbled into Iraq and Afghanistan thirteen years ago. 

Memorial Day is a day to honor the people that served and died for our country. Admittedly, it's easier to deal with dead soldiers than injured and suffering veterans. It's quite easy to have an annual parade, it's not easy to pay for and deliver the services and care to living veterans. But we continue to pride ourselves on the state of our military, and the 'greatest fighting force in the history of mankind' as so many chicken hawks are prone to proclaim.

There can be no military victories when there are failures of policy. The state we are leaving Afghanistan in, and Iraq before it, is a portrait of abject failure of policy, and wasted military resources, and lost and broken lives of thousands of American soldiers and their families.

How can there be any pretense of victory, or even the smallest modicum of success, when the President of the United States can only visit with American troops in an unannounced visit? Clearly it's not safe to make the president's location public, and if that doesn't show the failure of our efforts in Afghanistan in stark relief, than nothing will.

It's about six weeks until the Fourth of July. I can't wait for the parade.