Lives Wasted

So B.O. has already had to clarify his statement the other day, on the Campaign Trail, that over 3000 American lives have been wasted in Iraq.

Apparently, this is verboten. Why?

The first possibility is that no one could legitimately believe that U.S. casualties in Iraq are a waste of human life. But it seems to me that everyone who believes (1) that the war was a mistake, at best, if not an outright fraud, and (2) that the war has not made the U.S. or even the people of Iraq better off, but instead much, much worse off--everyone who believes those two things believes that the U.S. casualties were a waste of human life.

To believe this is, from a certain perspective--which, I will concede, is mine--to side with those troops. What our leaders have done to those young men and women--and not-so-young, given the number of Reservists and Guardsmen--is a betrayal and a disgrace. Because, specifically, they have wasted their lives and thrown them away, without reason. The proper emotional response to this is anger at the leaders who have done this. And, included in my anger are those who had positions of influence but did not use them to oppose the war before it happened--that includes many establishment Democrats and almost the entire national media.

But, apparently, to say that soldiers and Marines have died in a mistaken, tragic war, one that constitutes a betrayal of the American people by its leaders, but especially the troops--the one called on to make the sacrifice--is somehow to say something negative about the troops. Why?

I understand that it may be difficult for family members to deal with the tragedy of the death of loved ones who should not have been asked to sacrifice their lives at all. I'm sure that it helps, some, with the grief to believe that one's husband or father or brother (or mother etc.) died in a good cause. But I don't quite understand why we should, as a nation, be forced, forever and ever, to tiptoe around the grief of the families of the fallen. Or, more properly, why we should let the grief of the families of the fallen take a hostage--the truth about the war. Or, even worse, to let the leaders who have betrayed the fallen continue to betray them, through using their families as a cudgel to silence criticism of their reckless, misguided war.

That's where we are. One cannot criticize the troops, and therefore one cannot criticize their mission--by some twisted emotional logic of loss, used cynically by the same crew who lied us into this war. One cannot say the war was a mistake because that means that the fallen need not have died--and, since they have, that is to say that their lives were wasted, which pains their families--families understandably don't want to believe that their loved ones died in vain. But it seems to me that, as a nation, we have to be able to conclude that those deaths were in vain. Or we cannot stop a misguided war, ever, once it's begun. Because once it's begun, there is that cudgel of grief and loss.

This isn't about speaking truth to power. It's about speaking truth to the grief, which is powerful.

Note, nothing here is critical of how the troops themselves have comported themselves in Iraq. We know that there have been war crimes, but I'm sure that most of the troops, most of the time, have comported themselves honorably. But there is no contradiction to say that soldiers can serve an evil purpose honorably. They do not give themselves the orders, after all.