An interesting justification

Ryan Chapman, a "senior marketing major" is terribly offended that people would call him a "chickenhawk" just because he supports the Iraq War, but has no plans to sign up for the military to help fight that war. Here's an interesting justification:

The second lie liberals have been spouting lately is that conservatives, most notably the College Republicans, are being hypocritical for supporting the war in Iraq/on terror and the troops serving in those wars without enlisting themselves. This is ludicrous. Supporting the troops means letting them do their jobs and praying for their safety, NOT saying you support them and then holding a rally damning the cause they are fighting for.

"...letting them do their jobs and praying for their safety" sounds like an admirable thing to do. Presumably, that means seeing to it that they're properly supplied with things like body armor, properly armored vehicles, etc. Funny how a soldier challenged Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about why the government wasn't doing much about that back in December of last year. When a Gold Star Mother recently questioned why this still wasn't being done, the best a pro-war spokesman could offer was that the richest country in the world was "really trying to resolve that issue". [emphases added]

JERRICK: -- because we've had so many people respond to us at DaySide with their emails and phone calls saying that don't you feel like the people who are protesting this war, especially the people we saw down there in D.C. over the weekend, are just giving the terrorists in Iraq and the insurgents in Iraq more hope -- [applause] -- that possibly we're losing will in the United States to continue to battle?

ZAPPALA: Are we losing will because the mission we're trying to accomplish is ill-led, because the soldiers are not well supported, because the information --

HUDDY: When you say "not well supported," what do you mean by that?

ZAPPALA: I mean that we families have had to buy equipment for our young people because they are told you need to go but you're not being supplied with a global positioning device, or you're not being supplied with phones, or you may or may not get a flak jacket.

JERRICK: But the Pentagon is really trying to resolve that issue, Celeste. The Pentagon is really trying to resolve that problem.

I dunno, but it seems to me that the peaceniks are the ones calling for America to support the troops whereas it's the warmongers who are offering weak excuses for why our soldiers are still not receiving things they need, like flak jackets.

So what exactly is it that Ryan thinks peaceniks should not be doing? He says: "...holding a rally damning the cause they are fighting for.". But the soldiers didn't choose the cause. The Commander-in-Chief did that. It wasn't a group of soldiers who decided "Let's invade a country that had nothing to do with 9-11", who decided "Let's invade a country that is not allied with al Qaeda.", who decided "Let's invade a country that has no realistic means of attacking the US, with or without WMD."

No, the American People were urged to make these decisions by their Commander-in-Chief, a fellow named George W. Bush. The troops had nothing to do with that decision. I see nothing "anti-troops" about attacking the motivations behind the launching of the Iraq War.

Ryan fully deserves the title of "chickenhawk"