Thursday, November 11, 2004

Eleventh hour, eleventh day, eleventh month ... again

Exactly one year ago, I wrote an entry in this space about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Capital Mall in Washington.  Having just reread that entry, I stand by every word.  Visiting The Wall again during a meeting in DC last spring, I experienced anew its searing, overwhelming symbolic power.

Much has happened in the 366 days since Veterans Day of 2003.  Our little planet has seen a great deal of horrific news, from Abu Ghraib to the summer spate of hurricanes to beheadings in Iraq to the ongoing assault on Fallujah, and so much more.  Dubya’s Folly in Iraq has ended the lives of 756 American men and women in uniform in the last year, a bit over two deaths a day, every single day.  That the people of the United States of America were somehow swayed to elect George W. Bush as our president, while not horrific in the same sense of immediate danger and damage and awfulness, marks an emphatic exclamation point in the middle of what will eventually be an eight-year sentence.

What horrors and difficulties will we see in the next year, and the years after?  How many more veterans of foreign adventurism will those mad, oil-hungry imperialists create?  How many more of those brave, though misled and deceived into becoming neocon cannon fodder, heroes will be commemorated not only on this day of the year, but also on Memorial Day?

We must continually and forcefully ask Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Wolfowitz and Perle and Feith and their whole sick crew a question originally posed by a man who might have been elected president if he were still something close to who he was three decades ago,

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

[UPDATE (7:26pm):  added Iraq casualty count]