Honor the Dead & Oppose the War!

A blog reader noted today that I was getting “meaner” with my comments. Perhaps so. People are dying, after all. This is not simply an intellectual argument.

The ten marines that died yesterday were once young men with futures that came to abrupt ends because of decisions made by old men in Washington. Regardless of how we may feel about the war we must not forget to honor the memories of these young men. They did not ask to die there on that day: they were doing their duty to their country and no matter how angry we become with those politicians who sent them to their deaths, we must never forsake those who died under our flag. To that end, I have added a permanent link on the right side of this page to “Faces of the Fallen”, the Washington Post tribute – many with photographs – of the more than 2000 American dead in the Iraqi war so far.

Having said that, don’t permit our collective tribute to the dead to dull our resolve to get those still living the hell out of there!

A lot of right-wingers would call you unpatriotic and accuse you of betraying the dead for opposing the war. Familiar stuff from the Vietnam days. As the rationale for the war grows murkier, as the strategy gets confused, as friend and enemy start to look a lot alike, as the body count grows – there’s always some guy wrapped in a flag waving a bloody shirt demanding we go forward lest we dishonor the fallen. They would have us give more lives, rather than risk acknowledging those who died may have died for nothing.

We’re not stupid. We’ve heard this crap before. We will not be shamed, we will not be brainwashed, we will not be silenced. There are things worth dying for. A flawed policy based upon lies, faulty intelligence and twisted ideology is not one of those things.

I am able to present this photo of flag-draped coffins here only because of a man named Russ Kick who filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain these. Why would he have to file a Freedom of Information Act request to see these images? Because this administration does not want to acknowledge the consequences of our Iraqi adventure. “Since March 2003, a newly-enforced military regulation has forbidden taking or distributing images of caskets or body tubes containing the remains of soldiers who died overseas…”They don’t want you to see the gory details. They don’t want to distract you from your job, your weekends in the country, your shopping days at the mall, your moments of mirth and merry with something so dreary as pictures of coffins draped in flags that contain what’s left of a young man or woman who took an oath to defend our freedom and wound up a roadside casualty in places like Baghdad or Fallujah because George W. Bush and his right-wing cronies had an off-course plan to remake the Middle East – over those dead bodies that lie in those flag-draped coffins above.

We owe it to the everyday heroes that wear our uniform and fight for our flag to keep them safe and get them home before they end up the same way.