A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

Please use the comment section below to tell us what "support our troops" means to you.

It is a phrase so hot wired into Americans, and feared to hold an omnipotent power by those on Capitol Hill, that it cannot be understood through the lens of common sense and reason: Why send more American GIs to die in a war without mission or purpose, whose only apparent definition of "victory" appears to be that the U.S. will not be perceived as losing? But no one in power can even define what not losing would be at this point.

No such questions are allowed at the shrine of "support our troops." Trying to save their lives is not supporting them, but sending more to be killed is?

Maybe the phrase "support our troops" really is a selfish one for Americans. It means, perhaps, "I am an American – virtuous, Christian and white – and I am destined and deserve to be on the team of victory, because we are a benevolent nation trying to tame the world and fight back the heathens."

Or to Cheney and Bush, "support our troops" means that the natural resources of the world and geopolitical control of nations is the right of America, so we cannot afford to "lose."

Here is what Ira Chernus, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, thinks:

By now, in the midst of policy and military disaster, victory culture has narrowed to "supporting our troops." Congress cannot defund the war because lawmakers fear the ultimate charge of betrayal, a Congressional "stab in the back" for failing to "support our troops." The obvious logical response -- "The best way to support our troops is to bring them home to their loved ones" -- doesn't cut it in today's political climate. With not a shred of victory in sight, "our troops" have become the prime symbol of both American virtue and insecurity, the prime reason to stay in Iraq now that every other publicly ballyhooed reason has disappeared.

That's an old story. Ever since the Minutemen, soldiers have often been iconic emblems of everything that was imagined as pure, innocent, and vulnerable about America. There's even a history of portraying the American fighting man as a Christ-figure -- a staple of Vietnam movies from Sgt. Elias in Platoon to Rambo.

Now, who can deny that our "kids" in Iraq are, by and large, decent and well-meaning or that they face terrible risks daily? They are the constant heroes in stories of virtue, innocence, and insecurity that fill the media, stories usually detached from any political context, as if Iraq were merely a stage without much scenery and lacking all plot on which "our troops" continuously perform their heroic, sometimes almost mythic, deeds. And those media stories make the image of a virtuous, innocent, and insecure America eminently believable -- but only so long as our troops are deployed in harm's way.

For the broad center of the American public, "supporting our troops" also means supporting some version, however attenuated, of victory culture. By now, vast numbers of Americans realize that we'll surely win no real victory in Iraq. Who is even sure what winning there might mean? But whatever our stumbles, our war stories are supposed to have some kind of happy ending. Every generation sent to war is supposed to be "the greatest."

Tell us and other BuzzFlash.com readers what you think the phrase "support our troops" means?

We want to hear from you.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL