When measured in the balance, some are found wanting.
Empty Words for the War-Torn
Since President Bush's State of the Union speech last year, thousands of Americans have experienced the emotional equivalent of a 9/11 event in their lives. Because the tragedies weren't collective, didn't occur in a single day or within the confines of a downtown city block, the devastation and pain may have been lost on the rest of us. But within the past year, more than 500 Americans have lost their lives, thousands have been maimed -- many for life -- and an untold number of U.S. families and communities have been shattered because of war in a far-off place called Iraq.
Last Tuesday night was an opportunity for George W. Bush to eulogize the fallen, a chance for him to tell their families what their sacrifices mean to the nation -- a time for the president to help heal broken hearts. That didn't happen.
Yes, in his long address to a joint session of Congress, Bush offered a few words of praise for the skill and courage of the men and women in the military. He delivered a line about "sorrow when one is lost," and shared a self-serving recollection of himself landing on the deck of a carrier in the Pacific Ocean and his Thanksgiving Day fly-in to Baghdad. There was also a pledge to supply the troops with all the resources they need to fight and win. But victims of the Iraq war, as well as their moms, dads, spouses, children, neighbors and friends, deserved more than what they got from the president.
Instead of a moment of silence for those who have paid the ultimate price, they heard presidential pitches for prescription drugs and a new immigration law, and a denunciation of steroids and gay marriage. Instead of hearing the president recognize the preciousness of young lives expended far from home, they got a plea to put Social Security taxes in personal retirement accounts. Instead of telling the country why it should remember what the dead and dying stood for, Americans were given an earful on child tax credits, the death tax and cuts in taxes on capital gains.
Sure, the president had a right to use the State of the Union to defend his policies against his Democratic critics. And, yes, it was no surprise that he took advantage of the occasion to trot out his campaign themes.
But all the smiling and presidential bonhomie on display seemed ill-placed for a country still at war. Looking at the partisan cheering and all of the leaping-to-their-feet on the Republican side of the aisle, you wouldn't know that thousands of Americans are bearing the sorrows of armed conflict. You wouldn't know that the chief reason we went to war -- because Saddam Hussein allegedly had weapons of mass destruction and planned to use them -- has not been backed up by any credible evidence.
Tuesday was the time to tell U.S. families whose sons and daughters are losing their lives and limbs that their brave sacrifices still make sense -- even as we saw on the front page a photograph of able-bodied Iraqi men enjoying themselves at the horse races. Tuesday was the time to explain why the nation is straining under a growing budget deficit, and why the military is stretched to nearly the breaking point. The families needed an honest answer as to why young men and women in uniform are expected to fight and die in country dominated by clerics who want our protection as they vie for power and, once they get it, want us gone.
Instead, we got a Bush speech laying the groundwork for his quest for reelection.
This does not come from a Bush hater. He rallied the nation after Sept. 11, 2001, and set the right tone for a military response to al Qaeda. George W. Bush is not the ogre his critics make him out to be. But if ever the country needed a commander in chief who understands the horrors and wastes of war, it's now. That kind of president was not on display Tuesday night.
To know what it means to be in combat and to experience the trauma of war, we must look beyond this White House and the Pentagon's civilian war planners.
Perhaps that explains the appeal of public figures such as Sens. John F. Kerry and John McCain, retired general and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark.
I have just read an account of war by a recipient of three Purple Hearts for wounds, a holder of the Bronze Star and the Silver Star for gallantry in action. He was writing at the time to his future wife about the death of a friend in the service of America:
"I don't know really where to begin -- everything is so hollow and ridiculous, so stilted and so empty. I have never in my life been so alone with something like this before. I feel so bitter and angry and everywhere around me there is nothing but violence and war and gross insensitivity. . . . The world I am part of out there is so very different from anything you, I, or our close friends can imagine. It is filled with primitive survival, with destruction of an endless always seemingly pointless nature and forces one to grow up in a fast, no holds barred fashion."
He described the sight of a violent death.
"I didn't know his name. Nobody in the tent did, I think. He was completely nude and his bony, minute body was stretched out on the brown plastic mat covering the operating table." He watched as pints of blood were pumped into the man, whose neck was bleeding.
He described the blood pouring out of the man and how his own stomach began to twist, and sweat poured all over him -- how he sat down on the floor because he thought he was going to be sick.
Suddenly the man's right arm moved straight out, grasping toward the door. "He grunted desperately. . . . His toes, sticking out from the plastic splints, twinkled back and forth. He tried to raise his head and look -- perhaps ask something -- perhaps a last twinge of fight -- and then he was quiet. His right hand, still reaching, came down slowly onto his chest and his other arm, bandaged and absent, lolled over the side of the stretcher." The man, he said, was gone.
"No words. No cry," wrote then-Lt. j.g. John Kerry.
The account appeared in "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War," by Douglas Brinkley, excerpted in the December 2003 issue of Atlantic Monthly.
A president who has been down in the trenches and seen people die would never have gone up to Capitol Hill in the midst of war and delivered the kind of State of the Union speech that the nation heard Tuesday night.
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