NB visitors coming straight from Facebook: Sedition·com has nothing to do with Facebook or any of its groups—at all—and you probably couldn’t pay us enough to change that fact. See also: The return of some well-meaning fan mail.

When you say, “Support the troops,” what you really mean is “Don’t criticize this war.” When you say, “Don’t criticize this war,” what you’re really saying is, “Fuck the troops.”

I’m an American. I love my country and want the best for its future because it’s my future, my family’s. There is no other country quite the same nor as free though I don’t think it’s nearly free enough but that’s a cat for another skinning.

The troops are not protecting me, my family, or my country. Iraq was no threat to the US. The President, his puppeteers, and a chorus of sycophants filtered, distorted, and manipulated the information at hand to suggest otherwise. It was lies. You heard half of them yourself. The whole incident, the whole cabal, will be remembered as a horrifying joke. Historians will run races against James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, and George W Bush to select the worst US President in history.

The troops are not eliminating terrorism. They are spawning it. Massive amounts of it. There were no terrorists to speak of in Iraq before the war. It’s now a breeding ground for it. Just like Afghanistan was when Russia invaded there in 1979 and the CIA propped up freedom fighters. One you know by name: Osama bin Laden.1

The troops are hurting me. They’re taking my tax dollars to live 6,000 miles away and expend expensive ordnance. They’re making it unsafe for me to lay my American passport down when I travel in places like Indonesia or Africa. They’re teaching the world that American soldiers can shoot an unarmed, wounded man to death on camera and it’s not a crime. They’re implying to the world that I somehow support that instead of lynching the morons who get away with it.

The troops are hurting Iraq. Hussein was a beast but he was, of late, a stable and relatively innocuous one. The Baghdad morgue is taking in more than 1,000 murder victims a month and the number has been steadily rising since the war started. It’s also a minimum because many murders go unreported and unrecognized. This is a single city in Iraq where 20,000 civilians will be murdered this year. It will be called civil unrest but 20,000 dead in one city is a combination of anarchy and civil war. In New York City, 1.6 times more populous than Baghdad, there will be around 600 murders this year.

The troops are decent men killing innocent people because the situation backs them into corners they can shoot through but can’t see around. They’re getting hammered with things that cause post traumatic stress in strong men. As the news from Abu Ghraib, Ishaqi, Haditha, and even the American soil of Guantanamo Bay suggests, they’re being turned into monsters by these forced situations.

Far above reasonable averages, they’re coming home to divorces. They’re coming home unemployable, unable to function in normal society; damaged goods, psychological splatter damage. They’re coming home to kill their wives. They’re coming home to kill themselves. They’re even coming home with the potential to be the exact thing they’re supposedly stopping, the worst single terrorist we’ve had.

The price you think the war is exacting on them isn’t just a couple of body bags stuffed in flag-wrapped oak boxes a day. The price of this is a book of blank checks without so much as an expiration date. Stop signing them.

Support the troops? Bring them the fuck home and give everyone who wants it an honorable discharge so they can get back to taking care of America in person. Then everyone here could support them in ways that aren’t a twisted piece of jingoism tied to bumpers with yellow ribbons.