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War Room: Political News, Politics News - Salon

After refusing to support the Webb amendment giving the troops a decent interval between deployments, the blocking the defense authorization bill, President Bush and the Republicans are now wailing that the Democrats are refusing to give the military a pay raise.

This is the same pay raise that was part of the defense authorization bill they just blocked and the same pay raise the president himself threatened to veto just two months ago. It was reported at the time that the Bush administration “’strongly opposes’ both the 3.5 percent raise for 2008 and the follow-on increases, calling extra pay increases ‘unnecessary.’”

As I read more and more items like the one above, I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between “doing what we want” versus “doing what we can.” We want to support our troops. Bush tells us to support our troops by letting them finish the job in Iraq. But think about all the other ways we could be supporting our troops.

After fours year, you would think we could have already provided armored vehicles that can survive IEDs. How many ships and aircraft did we produce during World War II?

If we want to, we can also give them pay raises and keep our promises to take care of those who return from Iraq in terms of health care and other benefits.

There are plenty of things we can do to support our troops. So why is it that the only thing many want to do is to put little stickers on their cars and maybe write an email to any service person? How “meaningful” is our want to support the troops when we refuse to make financial sacrifices even though we can simply because we don’t want to be inconvenienced?

Technorati Tags: support our troops, Iraq, veterans affairs, military budget, taxes

Filed under: Taxes, military budget, support our troops, veterans affairs