"They Died For Their Country"

"Thoughts on the wars we fight, and those who die in them:
The President's speech Tuesday had the ring of familiarity to it -- utterly flat, remarkably stale familiarity. Sooner or later, when words ring so familiarly and are, at the same time, so discordant in relation to reality, even a President's supporters begin to worry. If anything in the President's speech was new, it was only to the degree that reality had somehow infiltrated his world, despite the best efforts of his handlers. For instance, in the relatively brief speech, clearly meant to be upbeat despite bad times in Iraq, "loss" and "lose" were used 7 times; "prevail" twice; "win", "won," "victory," "triumph" not at all. Iraq was mentioned 91 times and Afghanistan only twice (even as news about a Taliban-downed Chinook helicopter carrying 16 Americans was being played down at the Pentagon so that it would not share headlines with the President's message)."-from the Introduction by Tom Engelhardt to the article by Seattle writer Paul Rogat Loeb in Mother Jones. Here's a blurb: "Unfortunately, those who initiated the Iraq war now use each additional American death to justify the need to stay. If we challenge this war, we're told we're being disloyal to the troops, undermining their resolve and disdaining their sacrifices. We heard this as well during Vietnam, after which the media rewrote the history of the antiwar movement to imply, through images like protestors spitting on soldiers, that those working to bring the troops home were their enemies. Among the many mantras repeated by the President, none perhaps was more familiar than the need for Americans to "support our troops." This has been a line pushed hard not just by this administration but by the right more generally ever since the 1980s and has become something of a patriotic serum, meant to innoculate all who use it against close examination of the policies that those troops are sent to carry out. It's a strange formula when you think about it -- to urge people to support the troops, not the policies -- but it's the essence of our present political world. The truth is that the troops -- our young men and women -- whom George Bush sent off so rashly into the world to fight and die are doing so, even if in the name of "freedom," for practices that are anything but free and generally strikingly un-American."