Pet Peeve: "Sacrifice"

There's been a little discussion on whether the government is "wasting" the lives of our troops in Iraq, or "sacrificing" the lives of our troops in Iraq. I vote for "wasting", as the only people capable of sacrificing our troops are the troops themselves. The government can send them over there, commit them to missions good or bad, but it cannot sacrifice them.

The lives of the troops are not the government's to give. Only the soldiers themselves can make their lives a sacrifice. They do so, and for that we honor them, even when we find the mission they've been sent on is immoral or unjust.

It is the responsibility of the government to make the soldiers' sacrifice mean something. That the government has utterly failed to do so means that the government is wasting the lives, wasting the SACRIFICE, of our soldiers.

And that's yet another reason why anyone with half a brain hates Bush and his fellow traitors for starting the Iraq war and destroying so many lives in the process. Bush could have been the most popular president ever if he'd simply finished the job in Afghanistan, with the support of the entire world behind him, first. But abandoning the real war against terror in Afghanistan for his war of oil and war profiteering in Iraq has made him worse than the terrorists in many ways, and deserving of spending the rest of his miserable, murderous life in a tiny prison cell with padded walls so he cannot hurt anyone else.