May 19^th, 2006

“All societies build monuments to their dead to convince future combatants that it’s an honor to die in battle”
  – Dr. Temperance Brennan, a fictional character on the television series Bones

…it’s almost ironic that FOX picks up this discussion. Nevertheless, there’s a new Django-powered application developed by the Washington Post: Faces Of The Fallen, a database of all soldiers that were killed during the war in Iraq. The pretext to the war was the biggest lie told to the public for generations. I’m still disgusted by the thought that our now-chancellor Angela Merkel offered the lives of German Soldiers to support the lying, backwards, fiscally-irresponsible, self-aggrandizing coward that is President Bush, in an idiotic bid to score points with the administration.

Still, today I had the thought that whatever can be done to end the disaster in Iraq, needs to be done in a way that allows thousands of soldiers to save face, to continue to believe that their sacrifice was somehow honorable, because if you take that away, there’s nothing left that’d be worth fighting for.

There seems to be no way to punish Bush and his group of equally guilty friends for what they did, but their real crime is that by lying again and again, they took away this thing that a society needs to believe in a cause that requires sacrifice. This seems to be the source of a perceived gap between the public and the armed forces, because the public knows that there is no glory in this war, but they can’t accept the war without it. So it wasn’t about defending the homeland, because Iraq was no threat to the US. It wasn’t about weapons of mass destruction, because there were none. And it wasn’t about democracy and freedom for the “Iraqi people”, because it seems that nobody bothered to find out that there is no such thing as “the Iraqi people”. So here is a mother, who lost an arm and a leg for possibly nothing. Nothing.