An editorial from today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune

Today this nation celebrates yet another in a long line of wartime Memorial Days. This one is doubly sad because the war now being waged in Iraq is such an unnecessary, fruitless war. And that makes each death there a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

Soldiers understand they may die in war; the risk comes with the rifle and boots of military life. But there’s a solemn bargain made when young people accept that risk. They put their unrealized dreams and hopes for adulthood on the line for the sake of their nation. They depend on the rest of us to guarantee that when they go as bidden into harm’s way, their nation’s safety truly is at risk. This is where we, the American people, have failed the troops in Iraq. We have not adequately kept our part in this sacred partnership with them. We have allowed them to be sent to die where they should not.

America did the same four decades ago, in Vietnam, and failed to learn the central lesson. But Americans did learn one thing, perhaps too well. In Vietnam, the public blamed the troops. Some people humiliated them and showed horrible disrespect for their service and sacrifice.

This time, the public has been determined to “support the troops.” The support they really needed was action to keep them home from Iraq, safe from needless risk. America failed at that, but once troops were committed, everyone was determined not to let them down.

But Americans did just that, allowing the rallying cry of “support the troops” to be hijacked. Anyone brave enough to seek an end to the mindless American occupation of Iraq is accused of “abandoning the troops.” The accusation, heavily overlaid with scurrilous tones of treason and surrender and cowardice, has so badly frightened members of Congress that they have forfeited their one strong, constitutionally prescribed method for stopping this endless and aimless war: refusing to further fund it.

This turns logic on its head. Defunding the war is the best way to support the troops, the only way that really matters. It is the best way to keep them safe. It is the only way Congress can force the Bush administration to bring them home — alive.

Imagine the bravery it takes to be effective in battle, to put aside all personal fears, to ignore the in-our-bones imperative to remain safe — all because it is your duty to your country. How much less bravery it should take for Congress to stop this madness, and for the rest of us to support that action.

To the cemeteries please travel today, and make time to pay sincere homage to the dead from Iraq. Our failures to truly support them while they were alive, by keeping them safe from unnecessary war, make our debt to them now truly incalculable.

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