It seems Halliburton is mooving their headquarters to Dubai. At first the MSN got it wrong, expecting it was a tax dodge. On closer examination, it looks like the move has little to do with taxes and EVERYTHING to do with getting executives out of the reach of Congressional subpoenas.

Consider the quandry. If they lie they will go to jail. If they tell the truth they will go to jail. Dubai may not be a garden spot, but it beats the hell out of sharing a cell with Libby.

So many of our young people enlisted because they see it as one of the few legitimate ways out of an abysmal future in some backwater town or barrio. There is an unofficial draft going on, called a “poverty draft”. Recruiters know it, and they deliberately target kids from poor high schools who don’t have much of a future. More affluent kids have better options open to them, and so the recruiters don’t waste much time with them.

Others have said a lot about the dismal treatment these young people get once they enlist: the lack of body armor, the gutting of the VA hospitals, and now we learn about how mentally or physically unfit wounded soldiers are being recycled back to the active theater.

The other side of the coin has little to do with the troops at all, it’s the obscene profits made by the war profiteers and their mercenaries, and the even more obscene profits envisioned by the energy and arms cartels in the form of their desire to control the oil wealth of the middle east. Thesse people utterly don’t care what it takes to achieve their ends, including the ruin of the United States.

And so on the one hand, you have our troops - who, when you come down to it, are our neighbors and family members: real people with names, faces, families, hopes and dreams - people we love and care about - being shoddily treated as cannon fodder, all in the service of the most outrageous, greedy enterprise this country has ever engaged in.

You’re darn right I support the troops, who are performing heroically under terrible conditions: get them out of this obscene hellhole of an assignment - and I condemn this war, and the greedy criminals who started it.

I don’t understand how people can *fail* to understand that one can think the troops are doing a hard, nasty job, and doing it to the best of their ability, but that the job is one that they shouldn’t have been ordered to perform.

We’ve got to change - among a thousand other things - the language around our involvement in Iraq. Supporting, not supporting, troops, the war - it’s gotten a life of its own when the “war” wasn’t born in the first place.

That said, what about the 100,000 plus contractors in Iraq? People rarely mention how much of our “support” is going in their pockets I bet that support is far more important to Cheney etal than troop support. Anybody have a break-down of where the proposed $100 billion for Iraq is going this year?

Matt: I took the “support the troops/support the war” dichotomy apart some time back in this post, which you are welcome to read.

A bit more:

Dave sees the flaw in Matt’s thinking; since “the troops” are not responsible for making the political decision to invade and occupy Iraq, “the troops” and “the war” are not inextricably fused.

Many of the troops want the war to be over asap; does that mean those troops don’t support the troops? I don’t think so.

During the Vietnam days the Purists were hostile to our troops knowing that to be consistent they could not support both the troops and the war.

It wasn’t that simple. Although certainly there were linear thinkers who blamed the troops for the war, most antiwar protesters felt they were acting on behalf of the troops. Indeed, as time went on, more and more antiwar protesters were returned Vietnam vets. Also as time went on many people who supported the war did not support the troops and blamed them for losing. For example, there were a number of VFW chapters that refused to accept Vietnam vets as members until many years later. The older guys thought Vietnam vets were all drug addicts and slackers..