PENALTIES PAID BY THE DEAD

Before you gather up the hot dogs and head out to the barbeque this afternoon, look in a mirror and ask yourself honestly if Iraq is something you would be willing to die for.
--Bob Herbert, "Consider the Living," New York Times, May 29, 2006

Start sending the children of the well-to-do to Baghdad, and start raising taxes to pay off the many hundreds of billions that the war is costing, and watch how quickly this tragic fiasco is brought to an end.
--ibid

Because it is natural to regard those who died in war as heroes, it can seem necessary to affirm the wars themselves as heroic, too…in a kind of amnesia. The true condition of war--what continually leaves battle-scarred survivors opposed to war--is readily forgotten…on the ground in Iraq, the full meaning of the consequences is blood red--Iraqi blood, American blood. As always, the first penalty for the failures…is paid by the dead.
--James Carroll, "Honor the Fallen, Not the War," Boston Globe, May 29, 2006.


We've had an interesting discussion going over on the parents' message board for my son's Marine Corps unit, which is currently deployed to one of the worst and bloodiest areas in Iraq.

One of the parents, who happens to be a retired Naval JAG lawyer, had posted an article that had appeared in the Marine Times about the investigations currently underway concerning two incidents involving Marines and the deaths of civilians. One of the Marine moms promptly scolded the systems administrator for allowing the article to be posted at all, claiming that such things "lead to the spread of rumor and hurt the morale of the troops."

Although I read the message board every day, I don't post over there very often; however, I was so outraged by that remark that I did make a lengthy post in which I pointed out that what hurts the troops' morale is that this terrible thing had to happen at all, not that their parents were discussing it. Our resident JAG helped us understand that we weren't to discuss specifics of either case, and that was fine--the whole point of my post was that there was no need to discuss what did or did not take place in those events, BUT WHAT EFFECT IT WILL HAVE ON OUR SONS, and how we, as parents, can help them cope.

I mentioned that my son had been very discouraged of late, and that his dad, a combat veteran himself, had been able to reassure him that such frustration is normal, when, as Dustin put it, "you are fighting a guerilla war with conventional tactics." The result is that you don't know who the enemy is, and you can't go after them as aggressively as they go after you because you have to obey standard Rules of Engagement--whereas the enemy has no rules.

For all their blowhard pro-war bombast, the conservatives have remained fairly quiet on this issue, but liberal op-eds I've read have been eloquent and far more sympathetic to the Marines than you might expect.

Here's Maureen Dowd in the New York Times:

It was inevitable. Marines are trained to take the hill and destroy the enemy. It is not their forte to be policemen while battling a ghostly foe, suicide bombers, ever more ingenious explosive devices, insurgents embedded among civilians, and rifle blasts fired from behind closed doors and minarets. They don't know who the enemy is. Is it a pregnant woman? A child? An Iraqi policeman? They don't know how to win, or what a win would entail.

Or perhaps you might be more inclined to listen to the words of a retired general:

"The blame for these incidents lies with the incredible strain bad decisions and bad judgment is putting on our incredible military."--Maj. Gen. John Batiste, to Chris Matthews.

I do hear conservatives blaming the media for what happened, as though simply reporting the facts of the incidents somehow makes them responsible for those incidents.

But the truth is that the blame--just as the blame for Abu Ghraib--must fall securely on the shoulders of not just those who pulled the trigger…but those civilian leaders and commanders-in-chief who insisted on shoving our military into a swarming ant's nest of chaos, confusion, and corpses with TOO FEW TROOPS and NO FRESH REPLACEMENTS.

I've said this before and I will say it again: If the American people and the chickenhawk leaders they so adore are so gung-ho to go to war then they damn well better grow some balls and INSTITUTE A NATIONAL DRAFT.

You've got the same severely undermanned military going back over there AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN, on THIRD and FOURTH DEPLOYMENTS, being thrown into hotbeds of insurgent activity like the Anbar Province and being spread out so thin you can damn near see through them.

And you're leaving them out there in the desert to rot, then acting all shocked and awed when they snap.

Yeah, wave your flags and slap those yellow ribbons on your pickup trucks you cowards.

Or send your own sons and daughters to fight and die for your wars.

Then maybe you'll know what Memorial Day really means.