A Memorial Day Note

Today, I went with my wife's family to the grave of her father who had served in Europe during WWII. But while they talked, laughed gently, and remembered Tom Carew of New York City, I couldn't help but think about the wasted deaths of the more than 3400 American troops who have been killed in Iraq. And think about them with a special sense of grief and appreciation.

In our discourse about the men and women who have fought in America's wars, there's an emphasis on American soldiers as fighting to "defend freedom." In fact, the Iraq war has been fought in the name of the most feckless imperial scheme that can be imagined. For the neo-conservatives who planned the war, the invasion of Iraq was the lynchpin of a grotesquely foolish vision of also invading Syria and Iran and establishing a direct American hegemony over the Arab world.

But the foolishness of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz was our foolishness because they were the duly elected officers of an elected government that enjoyed broad national support in the United States for the invasion. In other words, the soldiers and sailors who have died in Iraq have died for our national foolishness rather than our national freedom.

That's why Memorial Day is such a uniquely appropriate holiday in relation to wars like the war in Iraq. Given that we as a nation wasted the lives of the soldiers in those wars, we owe those who died in Iraq a debt beyond that which we owe to those who died in wars that actually did defend American freedom like WWII or the Revolutionary War. The least we can do for those who have died in Iraq is to give them our best words, wrap their memories tightly in our national myths, and then go forth and end this misbegotten war as soon as we possibly can. In that way, we can do better by the memories of those who died in Iraq than we did by them when they were alive.



That's what makes their deaths particularly