Memorial Day

I'm saddened, Bush, to find myself embarking on yet another jeremiad against your war on this Memorial Day. I grieve for those many more of our good young people who have died since this time last year. I'm also angry about their deaths. As Andy Rooney put it last night in his Sixty Minutes rant: it comforts us to say that our our soldiers "give their lives" for their country. But, he added, angrily, "they don't give their lives: their lives are taken from them." This morning, the television stations were showing pictures and telling the stories of some who died. It's heartbreaking to think of so much promise lost, so many families left to grieve for years to come, so many children who will never know their father--or their mother.

All this for a war whose necessity is increasingly in question. I recall those minutes from 10 Downing Street, released and published only weeks ago, which proved beyond question that you, Bush, had made the decision to go to war long before the stories that your people cooked up to validate the decision. What a dreadful commentary on our media that we heard so little about this stunning revelation! What a dreadful commentary on us, the American public, that the media judged the story to be of insufficient interest to us to give it play!

And now you and your people have succeeded in dividing the country yet again by insisting that those of us who oppose the war do not "support our troops," and are therefore at once unpatriotic and despicable in our disrespect for their sacrifice. How often can we say that we "support our troops," with all our hearts, but not the war in which they are sent to fight? That we honor and respect the courage of those men and women who serve their country, but not the misguided policies that put their lives at risk?

At this very moment, as I write, you are bloviating to the nation about courage and sacrifice and the "highest American ideals." Your Rumsfeld has just finished with his contribution to an event that purports to honor the dead, but which you are using as a pretext to justify your actions once again to the American people. There are those of us, however, who need to hold you accountable for those actions. We need to remind you that you gathered support for them with blatant lies and deceptions; that you rashly sent our troops to kill and die, well before all other options were exhausted, and in the face of world-wide opposition; that you abused, and continue to abuse, the power of your presidency to promote an agenda far removed from the will of the majority of those who entrusted you with this office.

To compound the false justifications for this war, you have bungled its conduct inexcusably. Your Rumsfeld, ignoring the sound advice of generals experienced in conflict, and post-conflict, proceeded on the arrogant assumption of "Shock and Awe"--the notion that the superiority of American military technology was alone enough to guarantee a speedy victory and resolution. How many men and women, American and Iraqi, have died--and continue to die--as a result of this unjustified presumption? How many Iraqi lives would have been spared with sufficient troop strength to keep the peace, once military conflict was complete? How much ill-will and hatred would have been avoided, had we been more prepared to mend what we had broken, with our bombs and our artillery? How much less easily would the insurgency have taken hold, had we been at pains to provide the Iraqi people with the security and the physical means to rebuild their lives?

And now, today, Memorial Day, you stand before the nation and proclaim the need to honor the memory of the dead by "completing their mission, by defeating the terrorists, and building a safer world." It's my own sad conclusion, Bush, that the "mission" was only theirs because you foisted it upon them; that your policies and attitudes have bred and multiplied the very terrorists you claim to be at war with; and that the world is a far less safe place for an America that sees in military action an acceptable way to impose its will on other nations.

Again, I grieve for the dead. I grieve for the wounded, and for their families. Above all, I grieve for a country that seems so confused about what it stands for that it has lost its spiritual and moral compass. In a rapidly changing world, we cannot prosper without the ability to change ourselves.