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
