Sunday, June 06, 2004

Indeed

From Newsweek:

When George W. Bush makes his D-Day anniversary visit to the Normandy beaches on Sunday, we’re going to hear a lot of well-honed speeches trying to compare the righteous combat forced on us in World War II with the war of choice we’ve entered into in Iraq. But only speechmakers from coddled, comfortable backgrounds who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger, much less seen “dead men by mass production,” would dare use the blood of those who died at Normandy 60 years ago to try to cleanse their conscience of those dying in Iraq today.

The United States entered World War II, as it had entered World War I, to defeat a proven aggressor and bring the war to an end. The Bush administration actually won its righteous war, in Afghanistan after the aggression of September 11, 2001. But that victory came too quickly, it seems, for our leaders to get much satisfaction from it. So they sent our kids to Iraq. And what is the goal there today, now that the reasons we were given at first have proved to be grand delusions? To spread democracy? To extirpate the very idea of terrorism? To work the will of God? Sixty years ago, those who thought they could teach the world how to live the only right way, which was their way, and launched unprovoked wars claiming this was the only thing could do to defend their values—those were the people we called the enemy.

But let’s be clear about the soldiers. Our soldiers. Those men and women in Iraq today are, indeed, just as heroic as those at Normandy. They have been put in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, but that’s not their fault. They are fighting and dying and trying to build something good as soldiers, despite the most foolhardy civilian leadership in the modern history of the United States. Like any G.I. Joe in World War II, they’re making the best of a bad situation.