Sacrifice, Pain, and Grief

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/29/1504/

Sacrifice, Pain, and Grief
by James Carroll

snip//

Even the most diehard of American commanders and politicians show signs of recognizing the strategic and (therefore) moral futility of the war in Iraq, which is why they are tangled in the impossible snares of what-to-do-now. The nation, meanwhile, has a larger problem, which is only apparently less pressing: How to reckon with the strategic and moral damage the United States has done and is still doing to the shared well-being of the human family?

In addition to the lives it has needlessly destroyed, the war has helped ignite the most volatile region on earth; it has polluted US relations with former allies; and it has resuscitated the armed suspicions of former enemies. What of more value has been lost than the golden opportunity at the end of the Cold War to further empty nuclear arsenals, to midwife international structures of law, to heal the planet’s poisoned environment, to address the global crisis of southern poverty?

Memorial Day is a time of social grief. We deliberately call to mind the names and faces of the dead. We attend to their selfless patriotism, and the courage with which they conducted themselves. We insist that, no matter how misbegotten the cause in which they died, they did not die in vain.

In the glorious past, that faith depended on carrying wars forward to the point of victory, which alone redeemed the mortal loss. But now, we eulogize the heroes without approving the war that killed them. Because today’s national desolation must include a larger grief for lost American virtue, the determination that the fallen not have died in vain requires that their sacrifice be taken as a fuller opening to the truths both of what our leaders have wrought, and of the responsibility that belongs to us all.

The proper memorial to the war in Iraq is its immediate end.