Al Daher and Seth

Al Dahler writes an opinion column. His recent column is provided below as is a response Seth sent to Mr. Dahler.....Interesting reading:

McCain more like Bush daily
Al Dahler
From a progressive point of view, observing the culling of the Republican presidential primary herd has been quite entertaining.
Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter, the two anti-immigrant bashers, were non-starters. Fred Thompson, whose anticipatory candidacy was highly touted, went nowhere once he entered the race. Rudy Giuliani, whose utterances always converged on 9/11 and theReagan legacy, turned out to be an empty suit. Mitt Romney, the businessman, learned the bitter lesson that money does not buy love and affection from the voting public.
Three candidates are left. Ron Paul was never a contender. Tenacious Mike Huckabee continues to hope for a miracle. That leaves us with the self-declared choice of the Republican party — John McCain.
Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts are in a state of funk while President Bush has embraced McCain as the conservatives' conservative. Will the Bush endorsement prove to be visionary or vacuous? Only time will tell.
In his courtship to endear himself with the Republican party establishment, McCain is morphing into a Bush clone. He will nominate only "strict constructionist" Supreme Court justices, e.g., Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia. The economically disastrous tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans will be made permanent. Health care will be left to the bureaucratic, multi-billion-dollar health insurance and pharmaceutical industries. Civil rights and civil liberties will continue to be shredded.
Hypocrisy best describes McCain's stand on health care. His and his family's health care is assured by four outstanding government-sponsored health care programs. As a military retiree, he and his family qualify for Tricare-for-Life. As a senator, he and his family are eligible for congressional health care. As a veteran, he is entitled to Veteran Administration services. And, his age makes him eligible for Medicare. While McCain and his family enjoy the largess of government-sponsored health care, he is willing to deny this privilege to ordinary Americans.
Victory in Iraq is emerging as the hallmark of the McCain campaign, yet he has never defined the substance of victory. Certainly, Secretary Gates' and General Petraeus' policies have been more successful than those of their predecessors. However, the Bush administration claimed progress in Afghanistan only to have the Taliban reemerge. Al Qaeda keeps growing stronger.
Irregular or guerrilla forces and non-government-sponsored insurgents or terrorists, when confronted with well-organized armed might, simply withdraw from the battlefield to preserve their strength and await more opportune times. Time is on their side. They have nowhere else to go, nothing else to do but wait for more favorable times to continue their struggles. Politically, there has been no cooperation or reconciliation among Iraq's factions. The age-old and well-honed hatreds persist and will continue to nullify and sabotage any peace initiatives.
Financially, the Iraq debacle defies any conception of victory. The American people have been, and continue to be, the losers. The war is costing approximately $343 million each day or two to three billion dollars each week. With an estimated expenditure of $150 billion per year, the cost is fast approaching a trillion dollars. This does not account for repairing and replacing unserviceable and destroyed equipment, or the care of the wounded and traumatized veterans, or the money wasted on homeland security to provide an illusion of safety from terrorism and mass killings. It may be well to remember that recent killing atrocities, e.g., Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, have been perpetrated by Americans and not Islamic terrorists.
The magnitude of this financial hemorrhage becomes staggering when considering the opportunity cost, i.e., the domestic program enhancement and initiatives that are being sacrificed, the enormous debt accumulation that will place our children and grandchildren in bondage to foreign lenders, and the lack of foreign assistance to developing nations to improve the quality of life in the global village.

Al Dahler is a retired Air Force officer and a former college prep school administrator and lay hospital chaplain

Seth's email to Mr. Dahler:
Mr. Dahler,
My name is Seth Lovell, and I am a SPC in the Virginia Army National Guard, and am currently deployed to Iraq. I read the Newsleader online daily, and always enjoy your articles. I especially enjoyed your article today concerning McCain and how his policies compare to Bush. I agree with your article, and the prospects of a McCain presidency worry me. Your point concerning the cost of the war for America is very important. The biggest issue I have though as a service member serving in Iraq is not the monetary cost, but the cost in personnel. Not only are we losing good soldiers through casualties, but also we are losing them through retention. I have been in the National Guard for four years, and this is my second deployment. I was deployed in 2004-2005 to Afghanistan with the same unit. We are working with an active duty company from the 101st, and are serving with guys who are now on their fourth tour of duty. It is America who is carrying this burden, but more specifically it is the military that is carrying the brunt of this. Military leaders claim that recruitment is up, but at what cost? We have raised the maximum age to enlist, and have continually lowered the standards. I worked in Staunton for a year as a cadre member in the regional Recruit Sustainment Program (RSP). Our job was to have enlistees who were waiting to go to basic training come to drill with us for their monthly training. We trained them in rank structure, drill and ceremony, general orders, and other basic information that would help their transition into basic training go smoother. We worked with close to one hundred kids each month. While doing this training I was able to get a first hand look at the type of recruits that were entering into the military. There were numerous kids who had very little chance at being successful in basic training, and even less of a chance at being an asset once they reached their unit. While it is disheartening to see the caliber of soldiers entering the military, it is even worse to see the soldiers that are leaving the military after just one enlistment. We are losing a number of very qualified guys, with a lot of experience. The main reason that many of these outstanding soldiers state, is the fact that they can’t keep putting their civilian lives on hold to go overseas. If we continue to maintain current troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan as McCain claims is necessary, we will be doing a lot more than jeopardizing our nation’s economic interests. Our military can’t continue to sustain these frequent deployments. I believe that it is time to start thinking about what is in the best interest of our country, and in the best interest of its military. Thank you for taking the time to read my letter.