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Thursday, August 25, 2005

Why must we keep killing people who are killing people to show people that killing people is necessary?
Posted by Jill | 7:21 AM

Joe Conason on Bush's statements that we have to keep feeding kids into a meatgrinder to justify the deaths of the kids he's already fed into it:

However deeply George W. Bush indeed may care about the pain endured by our military families, his remarks at the V.F.W. convention didn't comfort those who question the necessity of that suffering. Stripped of the boilerplate verbiage about "the blessings of liberty," which remain remote in Iraq, he seemed to be saying that more Americans must die there because of the many already lost.

"We owe them something," he said. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for. We will honor their sacrifice by staying on the offensive against the terrorists, and building strong allies in Afghanistan and Iraq that will help us fight and win the war on terror."

Honoring the sacrifice of dead comrades is among the classical arguments for war, and probably dates back to the beginning of organized violence. Such speeches possess an emotional velocity that can swiftly carry listeners beyond the reach of reason. In that inflamed state of mind, citizens are less inclined to ask difficult questions about the war's supposed original aims or the purpose of continued conflict. Nobody wants to be accused of dishonoring the dead.

[snip]

Hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives later, what we seem likelier to get in Baghdad sometime soon is an Islamist government, tied to the theocratic regime in Iran, divided by ethnicity, religion and province, and embroiled in a burgeoning civil war that could embroil Iraq's neighbors and sink the region into turmoil.

To demand that the President face these facts and speak honestly about the situation in Iraq is to be accused of wanting to "cut and run," to weaken America and to dishonor the dead. His V.F.W. speech reprised the same old rhetoric about the lessons of the Sept. 11 attacks (a theme White House publicists evidently plan to emphasize on the fourth anniversary of the attacks next month with a country-music concert on the National Mall). He insists that his "straightforward" strategy will eventually "stand up" an Iraqi armed force that will permit our troops to come home. Mr. Bush has nothing new to say, which is why he has resorted to the ancient tactic of waving the bloody shirt.
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