Boston Legal takes on Iraq war

If you caught Boston Legal this week, you surely will agree the Iraq war case was great. C&L has the video clip that you must watch.

Alan Shore: First, this is hardly about anti-war sentiments. Private Elliot was for the war. Personally I was against it, then I was for it, then I was against it again--but that's just me. I'm a flip-flopper.

But whether one is for or against the occupation--and let's assume judging from your tie you wer for it--that does not exempt the military from a duty to be honest with its soldiers. Private Elliot was told he'd serve for a year, he was told that he wouldn't see combat. OK, unexpected stuff happens; he did see combat fine, but he was sent into combat with insufficient backup; he was sent to perform duties for which he was never ever trained; he wasn't given the most basic of equipment and then after his tour of duty was finally up they wouldn't let him leave. He never assumed those risks by enlisting.

Overextended, under-equipped, non-trained. He never signed up for that and now he's dead. And aside from his sister, nobody seems to care. We talk about honoring the troops, how 'bout we honor them by giving a damn when they're killed. Our kids are dying over there. In this country, the people, the media, we all chug along like there's nothing wrong. We can spend a month obsessing about Terri Schiavo but dare we show the body of a fallen soldier. The most watched cable news station will spend an hour a night on a missing girl in Aruba but God forbid we pay any attention when kids like Private Elliot are killed in action-

Judge: You're off the point.

Alan Shore: I'll not off the point. We've had 2,000 American trees fall in that forrest over there and we don't even know it, not really. But maybe we don't want to know about our children dying. So lucky for us that this war isn't really being televised. We are not seeing images of soldiers dying in the arms of their comrades, being blown apart in the streets of Baghdad. But they are, by the thousands and all the American public want to concern itself with is whether Brad and Angeline really are a couple. At least with Vietnam we all watched and we all got angry.

Judge: What does this have to do with the death of Private Elliot?

Alan Shore: Private Elliot is dead in part because we have a people and a government in denial. We currently have no strategy to fight this war, we have no time table for getting out, some of these troops could be extended for 20-plus years, their mothers and mathers have to spring for body amor but the Army doesn't and they're getting killed and we as a nation in denial are letting them. We simply don't seem to care. Well, she does. She's in this courtroom honoring one dead soldier. That's a start.