US Failing To Support Our Soldiers

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/06/1695/

US Failing To Support Our Soldiers
by Pat LaMarche

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Statistics released from a May 23 CBS poll find that 63 percent of Americans want a timetable for ending the war. If the members of Congress who have regularly betrayed the will of the people had to send their sons and daughters to Iraq, would we have a timetable? Would we be there at all?

And who will pay the debt we owe our veterans? Just Friday, approximately 3,000 Maine veterans were notified that they received an average of $250 worth of medicine the Veterans Administration had supplied but hadn’t billed them for, and those veterans, many of them elderly, now have to pay.

The United States Congressional Budget Office has estimated the 10-year costs of disability compensation for the Iraq conflict at around $1 billion and the 10-year costs of dependency and indemnity compensation to surviving family members at around $400 million. But none of us will be taxed to pay these costs, because the one stop-gap measure on unlimited indebtedness, the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985, expired on September 30, 2006.

Our country should never ask even one soldier to die if the citizenry and corporate America is unwilling to sacrifice as well. People must acknowledge the price of war. Companies must pay their fair share. If a conflict looms, we must tighten our belts and steel our resolve or we must not fight at all.

No just society should allow profit for the powerful from the suffering of the few. And now we have a new price tag for the Iraq war, but unlike 63 years ago, we have no mechanism to pay it.

We have 1.4 billion dollars to provide for our most disabled veterans, and only for 10 years. How about some perspective? About 1.4 billion seconds ago, 155,000 Allied soldiers stormed Normandy’s beach.