The confusion over what kind of veterans we're talking about is instructive.

We now regard "protest songs" about the Vietnam war and Civil Rights in the US as an essential part of the folk music canon. But if you imagine this site being in existence 30-40 years ago, they are the issues about which we would have been having the equivalent of today's BS threads and flame wars about Bush's oil war, the US's new Stasi legislation, Northern Ireland etc. The songs about today's conflicts are only beginning to be written.

Until the Bushies came along, it seemed that all the protesting and singing back then had served a useful purpose, and that the US at least wouldn't go down the same route again. Now I'm just indignant and depressed, but if any of you in the US can do anything to influence the course of events by writing and singing the songs of the present era before it's too late, go out and do it. Just remember to include the innocent Iraquis in them, and don't wait until there have been another 50,000 of them killed: the body count for US casualties in Iraq is unlikely to reach such levels anyway.

Pardon my provocative use of crude language, but Iraquis are human too, just as all those dead slopes/gooks once were.