I wonder how many US troops will be dead by Memorial Day 2008? I’m betting that it will be over five thousand, and possibly worse. You see, it’s 456 dead since New Years’ Day, 991 dead since Memorial Day last year. The pace is accelerating. This war doesn’t have any brakes, and it doesn’t have any steering. It can only pick up steam as it rolls downhill. The Republicans, in their vacant viciousness, don’t much care how many people get killed just so long as they can get elected, and the Democrats, in their quivering cowardice, don’t much care how many people get killed just so long as they can get elected, too. So you have a government of opportunists and weaklings who are utterly incapable of taking the reins and slowing the runaway. Putsch, doubtlessly savoring a bump in the polls, warned that the war will get bloodier and costlier as summer set in. August, he said, would be a particularly bad month. He didn’t seem particularly distressed by this, and that’s not unusual. To him, dead soldiers are just people too stupid to get born to rich, powerful families that can put them in safe, pseudo-patriotic positions where they are at risk of being shot at. In 2003, Gerry Trudeau was harshly condemned for listing the war dead – about 200 at the time – in his Sunday Memorial weekend edition of “Doonesbury”. He’s done the same each year, but this time he only listed the dead in the past year. He was running out of space. At that, the names were so tiny they were getting hard to read. It seems that the number of deaths diminishes the sacrifices of the individuals. Think fast: can you name a soldier who died in Iraq over the past year? No peeking! The rate of deaths is accelerating faster than it did in the early years of the Vietnam involvement. By the end of 1965, only 1,864 US soldiers had been killed, some 7,500 wounded. Iraq is ahead of that pace. The brakes were failing then, as well. It would be another three years and another 33,000 deaths before Walter Cronkite would intone, “This war cannot be won by military means.” Until then, Congress would fail to tug LBJ’s sleeve and ask him if he knew what he was doing, just like now, and the mainstream media would fail miserably in its role as watchdog, either ignoring the moral issues of the war as the newscasters did, or shutting down voices that questioned the war, as was done with the Smothers Brothers. Now, 40 years later and supposedly 40 years wiser, we have pathetic whores like the Associated Press, faithfully guarding the GOP by feigning outrage that Senator Obama would “politicize” Memorial Day by asking for better treatment for veterans (a friend of mine asked, in acid tones, if AP had similar criticisms of Putsch and Cheney for orating for the war in front of captive military audiences.) Putsch and Cheney, of course, were careful to select audiences where it is illegal to boo, let along drag-out-horsewhip-and-ride-out-of-town-on-a-rail. Cheney took advantage of his to condemn the Geneva convention and any other acts of human decency. The media of the 1960s was silent. The media of today is complicit. Both are deadly to a free democracy, but where the press merely failed in the 60s, it is actively contemptible today. One of the few instances left of actual journalism left on television is “60 Minutes” and they devoted an entire hour last night to the course of the occupation and the effect it was having on the members of the Iowa National Guard over the four plus years that the occupation has been stretching. In 2003, Iowa was one of the states most loyal to the administration, and people were proud of those who served, as were those who went. Four years later and most Iowans feel –correctly–that their trust and faith in the government had been betrayed. Only one trooper in Iraq still felt that his being in Iraq was necessary to avenge 9/11 and bring freedom to the Iraqi people. And what of all the people across the US? I was in my first peace march in 1964, years before the draft would be a factor in my life. The weight of the war was shared by the society, so even as the government and the media failed the people, the people weren’t given leave to fail themselves, and by 1966, war protests were widespread and impossible to ignore. One of the most vicious gimmicks the administration has used to diffuse criticism of the war is to lay the entire burden of the war on less than 1% of the population. There are about 300,000 troops and their families caught in a Catch-22 of ever-increasing tours of duty, the same people being sent back over and over until finally a road-side bomber gets them. Nobody “back home” worries about higher taxes, or having their children drafted, and for far too many people, with the element of personal risk and sacrifice removed, they have no reason to oppose the war because nobody important to them is being killed or maimed. That the administration would use such a cynical approach is disgusting. That the people of the United States would go along with it is a national disgrace. The right wingers, when they aren’t trying to shut Guiliani supporters out of the GOP debate (as is happening at the Freak Show at freerepublic.com) or condemning celebrities for criticizing the administration, are still trying to dress up their lack of concern in patriotic colors. People who don’t give a shit that the war was based on lies and people are dying for no good reason at all recite “In Flanders Fields” and are blissfully unaware that it commemorated a battle in which America did not participate because she was “too proud to fight”. Quite aside from the efforts to gain political traction from sacrifices made by Canadians, British, Belgian, Indians, French, and Germans – but not Americans – there is the fact that they do so with no sense of sacrifice, only political expedience. The only poppies blowing in this conflict are the opium poppies in Afghanistan, on their way to market to enslave tens of thousands of westerners. But the Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae perhaps had an inkling of what was to come in the unknown future. The larks still fly in the air. They still sing bravely. And they are scarcely heard.
