Waste

Three thousand, four hundred and fifty-four American soldiers have died in Iraq since March 21, 2003.

You know that, of course.  You may not have known the exact figure, but you probably knew it was somewhere between 3,000 and 3,500.  When another 46 soldiers die, you’ll know that it’s between 3,500 and 4,000 dead; and so it goes.  The number is easy to remember.  That the number represents 3,454 human beings, with families and friends and children and parents, is not.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain got in trouble earlier this year for questioning whether these soldiers’ lives had been wasted.  At a campaign stop in February, Obama said the war “should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and on which we’ve now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

more insideA few weeks later, in an appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman,” McCain said, “Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be.  We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives.”

Both men quickly backed off of their statements, and understandably so; the men and women who have died so far in Iraq died in service to their country.  They gave their lives when asked by their President to do so.  Those men and women did not waste their lives; they conducted them honorably, and gave them freely, and only a misguided fool would think that sacrifice a waste.

No, the soldiers who have died in Iraq did not waste their lives.  We wasted their sacrifice, and profaned their gift of service by demanding it be given in a war that should never have been started, in a war that drags on long after it should have ended.

This is not the first time that America has failed in its respect for our military.  Vietnam is the classic example of a war that was fought in the wrong place, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.  But we had learned the lessons of Vietnam, or so we thought.  That we are repeating those mistakes but a generation later is disheartening, to say the least.

Our soldiers deserve better than to lay down their lives for a cause that is lost.  They deserve better than to be placed in the middle of a slow-motion civil war, propping up a puppet government that has neither the will nor the capability of actually governing.  They deserve better to still be in a country which posed no threat to the United States when we invaded.  They deserve better than to be trying to implement the 749th iteration of the non-existent postwar planning that doomed their mission before it ever began.

They deserve better, and we have yet to give it to them.

Some day, the war will end, most likely sometime in early 2009.  And our soldiers will come home as Iraq descends into chaos.  And some will comment on what a waste of time and money and lives this war was.

And it was a waste.  But it was our waste, ours as a country.  We are the ones who supported this war, either tacitly or vocally.  We are the ones who reelected the incompetent fool who chose to engage a country that had no weapons of mass destruction, not even nerve gas, who chose to ignore all evidence and warning and plunge the country into a war of choice at a time when real enemies existed, enemies who remain at large to this very day.  We are the ones who even to this day have not taken to the streets to demand an end to the war, once and for all.

But that is our failure, ours as a nation.  Our soldiers have no such responsibility.  They simply did what their civilian leaders ordered them to do.  That those orders were foolish and misguided is something for the civilians to atone for; the soldiers simply did their job, and died.  For that, we as a nation must be profoundly grateful, and profoundly ashamed.