I watched the disappointing cloture vote on the Webb Amendment in the Senate this morning. That amendment would have mandated that troops sent over to the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan get as much time at home to rest between deployments as they had spent in-service in the war zones.

That seems so simple and so respectful of what is being asked of ‘our troops’ that you wonder how anyone could vote against it. What could be less controversial than asking that American soldiers spend time at home equal to the time they spent deployed in the war zones?

Watching the Webb Amendment being filibustered by stubborn Republican Senators, I kept remembering something John Kerry said in a speech he gave last year at Faneuil Hall in Boston. He spoke passionately that day about the nature of Dissent, and how there is both a right and responsibility for people to speak out when they feel the government is wrong.

What Kerry said about the unjust immorality of the war in Vietnam during his discourse on Dissent sadly applies just as strongly to what is going on today in Iraq:

… That’s certainly what I felt when I came home from Vietnam convinced that our political leaders were waging war simply to avoid responsibility for the mistakes that doomed our mission in the first place. Indeed, one of the architects of the war, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, confessed in a recent book that he knew victory was no longer a possibility far earlier than 1971.

By then, it was clear to me that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen - disproportionately poor and minority Americans - were being sent into the valley of the shadow of death for an illusion privately abandoned by the very men in Washington who kept sending them there.

<!-more-> An illusion privately abandoned by the very men who kept sending them there.

Like a lot of you, I have conversations with people about the war sometimes. These conversations range from discussions about why we are still there to the effect these deployments are having on soldiers and on their families. I had one conversation at a dentist’s office a few months back that was about one family and one soldier and about how his family is dealing with the deployment.

The soldier in question was scheduled to come home in March. His family had booked a hall and wanted to welcome their son home with a real party. They wanted to celebrate his service and officially honor what he had done for his country. However, their son’s tour of duty in Iraq was extended without warning instead, due to the personnel requirements of the surge that President Bush had implemented starting in January of this year.

Can you imagine what the following months must have been like for that family, and for so many other families like them, never knowing when their extended nightmare might end?

There are the endless days filled with worry about all the things that could go wrong, the desire to know the news conflicting with the fear of watching too much TV lest they see too much of what is going on in Iraq. There are the sleepless nights consumed by concern for the welfare of their sons and daughters who have still not been allowed to return from an unjust war.

The family whose story I heard that day had been given an end date for their son to come home. They had plans to celebrate the end of some of that worry, and a chance to finally go to sleep at night knowing that their child was safe for a while.

That family should have had time with their son at home equal to the time their son spent in Iraq, instead of spending each day and night still praying that he comes home to them at all.

That is what the policy always was. That was what the Webb Amendment sought to restore. That is what was denied this morning when all but a handful of Republican Senators voted to filibuster this Amendment.

There are too many Republican Senators who proclaim that they are breaking with the current policy and that they can no longer vote in lock-step to approve whatever President Bush wants, but then turn right around and continue enabling his unilateral actions when push comes to shove.

When are those Senators going to vote their consciences? When are they going to truly stand by the troops, instead of ignoring a soldier’s basic need to rest and recover from war?

When are they going to stop sending brave warriors back into the valley of the shadow of death for an illusion privately abandoned by the very people in Washington who keep sending them there?