What if they had a war and no babies got killed?

From the editors:

To hear some Vietnam veterans tell the story, the spit fell like April rains.

Housewives, financial executives, middle-schoolers and hospital orderlies regularly spat upon returning veterans and called them “baby killers.”

Whether or not most veterans truly encountered this kind of reproach simply because they participated in systematic genocide, or if they are apocryphal longings of damaged men trying to make sense of their lives, we don’t know. We weren't alive to see the spit fly.

It’s different nowadays, we’ve heard more than one vet say, referring to the surplus of American flags and yellow ribbon magnets and the absence of the emotionally charged, if not misleading, “baby killer.”

It is different in some ways, but we believe calling soldiers baby killers is still a good idea. But we don’t want to stop there.

Members of the state apparatus currently executing our invasions/occupations, unlike Vietnam, are all volunteer. At least at first.

And whether they hold a rifle, a computer keyboard, a wrench, a spatula, or a clipboard, each man and woman in uniform is actively participating in the war.

The U.S. hasn’t waged a just war in generations, and we believe this shameful chapter in our history to be an immoral, illegal, and utterly outrageous.

And, we must say it again, each and every member of the military, and their contractors, and the administration, and the blowhards that supported the war, they all volunteered.

It’s true a significant number of the military are not citizens, but are serving in a sort of foreign legion capacity, where their service could lead them toward citizenship, if they don’t get killed. It’s still voluntary, though, just like any other case when a desperate person commits murder.

(Military members are not without hope. As an Army lieutenant from Hawaii is doing, one can refuse to participate in murder and face the consequences, including several years in military prison. Ironic.)

It was unfair during Vietnam to emphasize the killing of babies when innocents of all ages were slaughtered by bombing, bullets, chemical weapons, and famine. However, in our age of personal responsibility, we feel compelled to suggest the term “baby killers” be applied to our fightin’ men and women in Iraq, that draining sink.

But, as we said before, let’s not stop there.

Unlike “fascist tool,” “baby killer” gets a gut-level reaction.

The problem with the mostly young men of the Vietnam war is that they didn’t have the brains, balls, or luck to dodge service. For their shortcomings they were summarily punished with 365 days in hell, if they were lucky. About 50,000 didn’t last that long. About four million southeast Asians perished during that war, many of them babies.

Things have changed. Iraq has seen mass murder (as opposed to the enemy casualties, collateral damage, and accidents), rape, torture, and the ineffectual government puts the number of Iraqi violent deaths, including babies, at about 150,000 since the invasion in 2003. Only ... Just ... A mere 2,800 or so Americans have died so far in Iraq, a fraction of the number maimed.

That’s a lot of death. It may not measure up to Vietnam’s body count, but once the numbers reach into the thousands, it becomes a landscape of corpses, and rotting flesh all smells the same.

More than Vietnam vets, those who planned the Iraqi adventure, touted it in the media, authorized it (including many Democrats, including John Kerry and Maria Cantwell), and, yes, executed it, deserve the pejorative “baby killer.”

Mothers and the media give us plenty reasons to “support the troops” (beyond, of course, paying taxes), including: they do not make decisions about where or when they become accomplices in mass murder; they want to do something good for their country; and they want to get a leg up in trying to make a productive, comfortable life for themselves and their families.

No doubt these are good reasons to sympathize with the troops. They are human beings, imperfect vessels, just like us.

However, none of these reasons justifies participating in the horror Iraq is going through today, or supporting the troops in creating that horror.

The war is morally and logically untenable on any scale, including individually.

So much political hay is made these days over “illegal immigration” and what it means to be an American, as though in itself being an American is something to guard and be proud of. We Americans reject readings of holy Islamic texts that justify killing and reject violent cults that act in the name of God, yet our country allowed a cheap huckster to start a world war and then re-elected him.

Put that next to the American people’s support for the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, and there is so much baby blood to go around, the soldiers, the politicians, and the pundits are covered in red. However, it’s time the others who are responsible be drenched.

Those who drive their cars and pay their taxes - like us - and support this crusade - not like us - are baby killers too. Like President Bush said, state allies of terrorists will be considered terrorists, our policy here is to hold ourselves to the same standard we hold others, including the troops whose lives are abstract GI Joe dolls to most of us.

Yes, it’s about time the pejorative “baby killer” be shared by the people truly responsible for the death and destruction: the American people.

Violence is not a solution for violence, and each individual, each bureaucrat, each media blowhard, and each soldier is unique and has the inherent right to not get jumped by a van full of assholes in Tacoma, Washington. Of all the guilty parties, the troops are the only ones who deserve leniency.

They do not deserve this leniency because, as the Nazi camp guards said, they were just following orders. We owe them this leniency because they “paid the ultimate price” for the ignorant and cruel fancy of the American people.

We’re all baby killers, that’s why the world hates us.