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by David Michael Green
From 1980 through 1988, hundreds of thousands of Iranian adolescents were massacred as literal cannon fodder during last century's longest conflict, and one of its bloodiest - the Iraq-Iran War.
It would be easy to feel bad about the slaughter of these children, but you don't when you realize that they'd been told they'd be going to Paradise as martyrs to Islam following their gruesome deaths. No, you don't feel bad. You feel worse.
And you don't feel bad when you learn that their government actually gave these kids little plastic keys which they were assured would allow them to open the gates of heaven once they got there. No, you don't feel bad. You feel like being sick.
All of that is shameful and ugly in the extreme. But it takes the additional knowledge that these keys were manufactured on an Israeli kibbutz to truly drive home the criminal insanity of modern war.
No clearer case is imaginable to demonstrate the way in which powerful people and powerful interests prey upon the innocent and turn them into political tools to realize the former's ambitions for wealth and power. Because these innocents are naive, or frightened - or, most harrowing of all, genuinely patriotic - such predators are cynically able to turn their very bodies into industrial war machine resources, no different than steel or silicon. Attach Part A (weapon) to Part B (weapon operating tool, a.k.a. human being). Deploy on battlefield.
Sadly, 'twas ever thus. Not for nothing did Europeans come to call war, "the sport of kings".
Of course, that could never happen here. Not now. Surely our young (and, in this war, not so young) soldiers are never called upon to fight in the interests of elites, interests so nefarious that they would have to be hidden under stacks of lies concerning national security threats, and behind a barrage of patriotic platitudes. Surely America's bravest are never treated as expendable cannon fodder by leaders who could care less about their welfare. Surely they're not trotted off the war like so many Iranian children, clutching a plastic key to heaven in one hand, and a fairytale of how much they're truly valued in the other.
More surely, that was a lot more believable even a week ago than it is today.
For even if you had miraculously somehow managed to hang on to the myth of the Iraq war as a just and necessary invasion for purposes of American national security, that fantasy must surely have been burst with the revelations of the Walter Reed scandal.
Has there ever been an American administration which wrapped itself so tightly in the flag? Have we ever had a government which hid its policies so carefully behind their supposed interest in the welfare of the troops? If you didn't know any better (which was precisely the idea) you'd have thought these people were tough American war veterans themselves, tempered in the crucible of battle, and now just empathetically looking out for the welfare of today's kids in situations similar to those in which they had once found themselves.
Never mind that none of them bothered to make their way over to Nam and pitch-in during their day. Except, of course, the only one who opposed the war (privately, that is, while he was selling it publicly at the United Nations). The same one they dumped right after the next election. But Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice - somehow none of these hyperpatriots ever managed to translate their jingoistic enthusiasm into actually putting themselves into harm's way.
And yet any American - even (or is it especially?) a real combat veteran - who dares doubt the wisdom of the president's breathtakingly transparent folly in Iraq has his or her patriotism publicly called into suspicion, always in the name of supporting the troops. To speak the truth is to risk accusations of treason.
Somehow, to call for our soldiers to be removed from a chaotic civil war which was sold on lies from the beginning, and cannot be won but only prolonged until this gang is safely out of office, is failing to support the troops. But sacrificing these soldiers - over three thousand now, with tens of thousands if not as many as a hundred thousand of them gravely injured - for these lies, and to protect this president's pride, is supporting the troops.
Somehow, calling for these troops to come home safely is undermining them. But sending them on a mission invading an ancient civilization, when the fool who sent them there had only learned of the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims months after he had decided to go to war, is supporting the troops.
Somehow, criticizing the war is an unpatriotic act that disrespects the troops, but sending them to Iraq in insufficient numbers to possibly succeed in order to test the pet theory of a now-fired Secretary of Defense is supporting them.
Somehow, criticizing a commander-in-chief who can't be bothered to attend a single military funeral is undermining our war effort. But his failing to equip our soldiers with proper armor - to this day, four years into the war - such that their home
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