Iraq almost = Vietnam

It has been about 2 years since my last post. Unfortunately everything I said about this stupid Iraq war has turned out to be true. It has truly turned into a quagmire very much like Vietnam. With one notable exception. About a month ago there was a drive to raise food and supplies for the troops in Iraq where I work. Large boxes were placed at the entrances to work for people to drop in canned goods and anything else for the troops. To my surprise those boxes were always empty. I checked them from time to time and I tell you, no one donated anything. I have a theory as to why no one cares and it leads to the one major difference between the Iraq war and the Vietname war. In the Vietnam war we had the draft and the soldiers dying were the young kids of middle classes parents all across America, many of them college educated people. That is why the public support for the war was so low, given that our soldiers were dying for a questionable cause. The war was affecting a significant portion of middle America. In Iraq, the soldiers dying are either young volunteers usually from poor families, or older soldiers with families and children who are National Guard volunteers. And no one seems to mind so much about these people dying in Iraq. In fact I remember a conversation with a conservative coworker who supports the war. I asked about those poor National Guard folks who find themseleves in Iraq and his response was 'that those people knew when they voluntered that there was a chance they could end up being sent to war.' And the truth is that technically he is right. But you tell me that a thirty-something father of 3 who volunteered into the Guard in the nineties during the Clinton years (probably for obtaining funding for education), you tell me that he would have signed up if he knew he was going to end up in Iraq a few years later getting shot at? So the bottom line is that these poor bastards are dying in vain over there and the majority of the people here feel no pain or have any sense of their sacrifice as evidenced by their lack of support during the food drive at work.