I know this is a day late (to say the least) but I have a question:
How does one support the toops while opposing war?
After all, arn’t the troops the people who fight the war?
The troops don’t start the war. They are bound by military law to fight the warmongers fights. They can’t even say hell no…I won’t go! Less they face jail under the UCMJ.
The troops fight the war but it the government behind it.
You don’t get mad at the gun when someone is shot…you get mad at the person who pulled the trigger.
Our troops are the gun, or tool, that can be used to effect US (or any country’s) policy. The President of the US and to lesser extent the US Congress are the people you want to get angry with if you don’t support a given war. Write your congressperson/senator/president, protest, write articles, donate to anti-war organizations and most importantly VOTE to express your displeasure. Getting mad at the troops is wrong as they are duty bound to carry out the will of the President which presumably reflects the will of the American people (I know that is simplistic and not entirely correct but that’s the theory anyway).
I support the troops: if the government had listened to me, not a single American soldier would have died.
But bad policy isn’t the troops’ fault; they go where they are told.
Guess who does the trigger pulling on the battle field.
Sure, it is the governments fault for placing the troops on the battle field, and I don’t like the government for that, but you never see the word “government” in the solgan “Support the troops, oppose the war.”
This’n’s going to GD fer shure.
So let me go 'head and get my bits in now.
Since war doesn’t equal troops it seems ludicrously obtuse to try and confuse the two.
What is meant is that the decision to go to war is the object of objection. The troops, the actual human beings, are regarded as fellow humans and heroes, so they are supported.
Dostromin,
It is similar, (but not identical to), to the “love the sinner but hate the sin” concept.
Because I have high regard for the men and women who choose to serve in our armed forces, I think that they should only be asked to put themselves in harm’s way and put their lives on the line only in the most dire and grave of circumstances.
Since no credible evidence of the gravity or direness of the “threat to the US” posed by Iraq has been presented, sending our armed forces to Iraq is an act of the utmost disrespect to our troops because it asks them to put their lives on the line for inadequate reasons.
Thus because I support our troops I oppose the war, (the invasion of Iraq).
Btw, AFAICT, you completely misunderstood Whack-a-Mole’s analogy.
Most of our soldiers joined the military to protect us from harm. They did not join the military to bully weaker nations and help our leaders distract us from a lousy economy.
If you don’t believe that Iraq was a serious threat, then it follows that our troops were misused, and that many of them have died for an unjust cause.
So yeah, you oppose the war because you support the troops.
To support the troops but oppose the war makes no sense to me.
After all, its the troops who fight the war, that is, with NO troops (fighting force, whatever you want to call) in the world at all, there would be no way to wage war.
War isn’t something that just happens by accident or that cannot be prevented. People chose to serve in the military (or given the option of serving vs going to jail) and it is them who fight the war.
No fighting body = no fight
No troops = no war
Here’s a unique idea. Support both. 
Getting rid of troops entirely (which is not something that has a chance of happening) still won’t stop wars. All it takes is the push of a button, even from a non-soldier, to launch an ICBM.
No offence, but you’re taking a very idealistic, and very naive, view of this. For people in the military, being a soldier is their job. Sure, they can personally object to the war (althought I don’t think that they all do), but they still probably have families to care for. Getting themselves thrown in jail for refusing to fight might mean that they have no way to support their children.
Also consider that soldiers have lots of very close friends in the service with them. If their best friend is going off to fight, then they naturally might want to go too, to protect their friend; to watch their back, so to speak.
Yeah, and no guns = no shooting deaths. That still doesn’t mean that the guns are to blame instead of the person pulling the trigger.
The bottom line is that the troops often don’t have all the inforamation about a situation (very much like the public). They trust their superiors to make the correct decision about how to direct them.
Off to Great Debates.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
Try again, Reeder. It depends on the reason they assert on why they won’t go. There are some people who honestly and actually do have a change in conscience regarding military service. And some of those folks just happen to be in the military when they have such an awakening.
I believe that missle operators (and that sort of people) constitute as a fighting body.
So I support troops to fight in a war…so their kids can eat?
What about the kids that are accidently killed in the war?
What if the father is killed in the war?
Can’t support kids when your dead…
So I should support troops who fight wars because they want to stay with their friend? Personally, I think a good friend would try to convince his buddy to stay away from entering a war…
You don’t get it, in a war the soldier=the shooter. Take away the shooter, you take away the shootings. You take away the shootings you effectivly take away the war.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there will always be troops and armies and wars in the world, but the idea I am trying to get at is why and how do I support troops while opposing the when when the latter relies on the former to exist?
But they are ultimatly directed to kill, which is why people typically don’t like war.
Except (as has already been pointed out) most soldiers don’t enlist because they like killing and waging war. They enlist because they believe that America is worth defending. It would be great if there weren’t evil people in the world and no one needed an army, but that isn’t the case.
Not only is it naive to believe that soldiers should be able to decide which orders to follow, it isn’t even desireable. A general deciding that is isn’t going to follow the orders of the Commander in Chief is just a few steps away from a general who decides to march his division up the White House lawn because he feels he can do a better job leading the country.
It’s hard to get CO status once you’re in. The assumption is that you know what you’re getting into when you enlist. As a result, most people fail. If they aren’t discharged, then failure to go is failure to obey, and what happens then?
Dishonorable Discharge
Imprisonment
Criminal Record
Very few people are lucky enough to get even something as pleasant as a General Discharge as a Conscientious Objector. If they’re lucky they get shuttled over to another career field until they finish out their enlistment.
Dostromin, the old saw “What if they threw a war and nobody came” was stupid then and is stupid now. And that’s basically what you’re saying.
That’s because it’s a slogan, not a complete argument. When one uses the slogan, it implies all the arguments that might be made. When we say “oppose the war”, we are expressing our opinion against the government’s decision to wage war. Slogans are supposed to be a nifty way of condensing an idea into an easily repeated “sound bite”.
As for the OP’s question, I don’t why some people have such a hard time understanding the concept. It’s really very simple - just because one is against the government’s decision to wage war does not mean that he wishes death or defeat on our soldiers. Hence the phrase: “Support the troops, against the war”. I think it was more a reaction to the ridiculous strawman position advanced by some people that anyone opposed to the war must want our soldiers to die. That’s simply not true. It’s not that anyone wanted Iraq to win, it’s that they didn’t want us to attack them in the first place.
I support our troops. I respect the risk of their lives and their families’ well-being to protect ours as much as anyone can. I want their sacrifices to be meaningful. I do not tolerate, nor want anyone else to tolerate, wasting a single one of their lives.
This war doesn’t make us safer, it will do the opposite. I want as many of the troops to survive this tragic folly as possible, with a minimum of waste. That’s why I didn’t want them sent then, and why I want them brought home now.
Was that hard to follow?
“Support Our Troops” is nothing more than a PR slogan. It doesn’t mean anything. If I say it, what then? If I don’t, what?
I think our foreign policy should be discussed in length. Not glossed over with PR slogans.
What’s worse is that it’s entirely selfish, too. Affixing an “I Support Our Troops” bumper sticker to the back of your car is nothing more than a little self-congratulatory pat on the back, a way to let everyone know what a Good Person you are.
That seems like a fair assumption to me. So is it often ignored? When you (both you in particular and you in general) signed up with Uncle Sam, you knew full well that you’d be subverting your will and decision-making abilities to the military automaton. Why do I now have to give you a “free pass”? If you signed up with the military, you’re part of it. You gave up your right to disagree, and in a way your own identity. You’re as much a part of the military as the Commander in Chief. I don’t understand how I can condemn a war but not the military (remember, that’s both you AND Dubya) responsible for it. If you didn’t want to run the risk of having to do deplorable things, why sign up when you were fully aware of the risk of having to do said deplorable things? There are other ways of serving your country that don’t require you being put in such a morally precarious position.
quix: Affixing an “I Support Our Troops” bumper sticker to the back of your car is nothing more than a little self-congratulatory pat on the back, a way to let everyone know what a Good Person you are.
Yeah, but so’s all political sloganeering; there’s nothing uniquely self-congratulatory about “I Support Our Troops”.
Dostromin: Don’t get me wrong, I know there will always be troops and armies and wars in the world, but the idea I am trying to get at is why and how do I support troops while opposing the [war] when the latter relies on the former to exist?
I think there is some confusion in this thread about whether you’re talking about “opposing war” or “opposing the war”. The former, to most people, means some degree of universal pacifism, while the latter (at least now in the US) generally means opposing the recent invasion of Iraq.
Yes, if you’re considering the position of an absolutist pacifist who is opposed to all war under any circumstances, I think you are correct in saying that that person couldn’t logically say that they supported the troops, in any capacity. The most such a pacifist could really wish for, ISTM, is that all the troops get home safely without killing anybody and that they have a change of heart and espouse the cause of nonviolence and devote themselves to working to eliminate armed conflict thereafter. How could a true pacifist really support the troops or their essential mission in any other way? A soldier’s job is to fight, and absolutist pacifists oppose fighting.
However, I don’t think it’s necessarily inconsistent for a non-pacifist to be opposed to a particular war and still support the troops who are fighting it. As in, “We shouldn’t have sent you there but as long as we did, I hope you can end the fighting as quickly and humanely as possible and come home safe.”
Personally, I don’t think citizens should dissipate the strength of their opposition to particular policy decisions by taking out their anger on the tools of those decisions. Let’s address those top-down actions at the top.