Blue Mass Group

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It’s quite understandable.  For a parent who has lost a child; a

husband or wife who has lost a spouse; a child who has lost a

parent in that war, the pain is just so great.  And there is the

accompanying impulse to at least provide it with some dignity; to

attach to the death of this loved one some larger meaning.  That

is, after all, one of the things that makes us human.

At the end of the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln famously said,

  “… that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
  died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new
  birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the
  people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

He said that toward the end of one of the most brutal wars in

history up to that time — a war that was nonetheless justified,

and that he put in context with that speech.  For the Civil War

was at bottom a war forced on this country by the horror of the

institution of slavery and those who benefited from it, and

Lincoln, both in the Gettysburg address and in his Second

Inaugural, framed those deaths as justified in the cause of

freedom.

The same cannot be said of the war in Iraq.  It was sold to the

American people and to the Congress by a chain of lies.  It has

been a disaster.  Rather than making the world, or any part of

it, safer or more democratic, it has turned Iraq from a brutal

dictatorship into a vast breeding ground for terrorism.  The

actions of this administration in justifying and carrying out

acts of torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have brought shame

on this country around the world.  There is nothing about this

war that gives meaning or value to those deaths — whether of

Americans or Iraqis.  And many military families know this, and

are quite rightly furious.

The war has to be stopped, and stopped now.  And those Democrats

in Congress who shy away from calling for and voting for an

immediate end to this war, who shy away from confronting an

administration gone mad, are betraying the trust of those who

elected them.

But just stopping the war would not give these deaths any

meaning.  At most it would cut short the bloodshed.

What we can hope for, and work for, is not only that the war

should be stopped, but that it should be stopped “with

prejudice”, as the lawyers say: stopped in such a way that wars

like this would be very hard to start.  Stopped by putting in

place safeguards — not only in our laws, but also in our public

understanding and public discourse — that would prevent the kind

of cynical manipulation of peoples hopes and fears that could

lead to another travesty like this.  Stopped in such a way that

violations of civil liberties, abrogation of the Geneva

Convention, torture and extraordinary rendition would no longer

be possible.  That’s what needs to happen.

If we could do that, then we could say with some justification

that we were present and part of a new birth of freedom, and –

although the price paid would still have been far too great –

that those lives that had been lost in Iraq had not been wasted,

that those dead had not died in vain.

  –Carl Offner