Pro-War Chickenhawks and Firefighters

I was checking out CanadianCynic's blog and he/she had posted on the recent topic that has gained some meme-mentum lately; That in which Pro-Iraq-War chickenhawk bloggers and pundits try to rectify their "the war is critical and necessary" ideals with the simultaneous "but not so critical that I'm willing to put my own ass on the line to do the actual fighting" cop-out.

The strained analogy they use to justify this position is summarized thusly:

I have no intention of joining the fire dept., but when I see a house burning down I expect those that did to handle it. I have no intention of ever becoming a cop, but I think those that did should attempt to stop a bank robbery. In either case, the need for professionals to perform the functions they volunteered for and trained to do is obvious to me, and I don't see why expecting them to perform their function requires me to be willing to perform it as well.

The sheer weight of this fallacious analogy has annoyed me, but until just now, I hadn't bothered to really take a crack at it. However, I am admittedly rather pleased with my own take on how we could truly make this analogy work, (copied directly from my comments on cc's blog):

Okay, if they want to use that analogy, let's draw this baby out all the way to make it truly accurate.

If we're going to take the Iraq war and stuff it into an analogy with cops and firefighters, then we'd have to have Conservative Pundits and Bloggers who were vehemently Pro-Crime and Pro-Fire. And really, in the case of the Iraqmire, it would be Pro-Arson. And when we questioned the Arson, we'd hear that:"Questioning the fires undermines our firefighters!"

The ChimpAdmin would create a Coalition of Firefighters, and send them into Iraq, and they'd set fire to people's homes and businesses, then fight the resulting blazes. When people questioned the logic and wisdom of the operation, we'd hear that we need to fight fires abroad so that we don't have to fight them at home. We'd have op-eds worrying that our strapped volunteer fire companies didn't have the manpower to handle domestic fires and rescue tree-stranded kitties.

The Administration would talk about supporting our firefighters, but would send them over there without sufficient oxygen tanks and under-powered pumper trucks. Rumsfeld would proclaim:"You have to fight fires with the Hose Company you have, not the one you wish you had."

And inevitably, this would result in pissed-off radical muslim arsonists flocking into Iraq to set more fires which the Coalition Firefighters would have to put out. And we'd hear that our firefighters would come home as soon as the Iraqi fire departments were capable of putting out the inferno by themselves.

And then, when we questioned the Pro-Arson Conservative bloggers, and asked why, if they were so strongly in favor of our Iraqi Firefighting Operations, they didn't sign up themselves, we'd have to muddle through some kind of tortured analogy about garbage men.

Of course, sarcasm and cynicism aside, let's not forget that in real life, bullshit analogies aside, we've got people killing and dying over there for whatever the current justification is. And frankly, if someone is going to shriek about how this war is important and we need to keep fighting it, they damned well better be willing to enlist and either put up or STFU.