Andrew Bacevich, a history and international relations professor at Boston University, has been speaking out against the war and our international policies since before the Iraq War began. As a young Army officer, he saw first hand the effects of a disastrous war in Viet Nam.
On May 13 his son, also an Army officer, was killed in Salah al-Din province by a suicide bomb explosion. He writes in the Washington Post:
Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.'s life is priceless. Don't believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier's life: I've been handed the check. It's roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.
At the Washington Monthly blog, Kevin Drum sums up an article in the NY Times on how soldiers in Iraq feel about the war now, after finding the same Iraqi troops they're training by day have been bombing them at night:
The reports of individual soldiers provide a very limited view into how well or how badly the war is going. But eventually their voices add up, and it sounds like Delta Company has figured out the truth: that they're mostly just training Iraqi soldiers to be more efficient at killing both Americans and each other. They're inflaming a foreign civil war, not defending America, and the fact that their commander in chief continues to insist that they risk their lives anyway represents a betrayal of trust rarely equaled in modern history. These guys deserve better. They deserve a president who understands when to fight, how to fight, and how to win. George Bush plainly understands none of these things.
If you need a visual to illustrate this post, the New York Times has a moving photo in their slide show this morning, of a young woman lying on the grave of her fiancé who is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. She looks to be about the age of the Bush twins.
How sad that this Memorial Day there are so many more loved ones to remember.
