The Powerful Eat the Young ; A Few Brief Comments on the War in Iraq

In each studied generation, the young have served and died for the powerful. It would serve us ill to assume otherwise now. In the lead up to the Iraq war, threat to our homeland and tacit approval polls (which never quite got the question right), flashed such a green light in front of all the president’s men that they couldn’t rev up and race around the world fast enough crying Foe! Foe! Foe be gone! After all, what ever would have become of our budding country, way back then, if we hadn’t nipped the imminent threat of Native American culture in the bud?

War waged by a nation, any nation, more often than not, is a farce of ethical relativism more rooted in power and profit than in passion and principle, despite the lingo shoved down the gullet of the masses. The notion that much fighting is carried out by young, sometimes pubescent “soldiers” seems to indicate that not too many strong older men are willing to risk their lives for the profits of the few who stand to gain by bloodshed. Will war tactics change in this lifetime? Not likely. Not until the guys at the top start sending legions of their own to die.

Is it a surprise, really, that those wars waged in the twentieth century, as well as the inaugural war (if Bush had said “last war”, he’d have made it into my personal Bartlett’s) of the twenty-first century, are dowsed with fuel that is relentlessly fanned by the old, (and older still), guard of the power elite? Many people, seemingly most of those under 35 years of age, and a few of us older “ignorant” few who study bona fide literature and history, get it. “It” would be the folly of fruitlessly fighting and dying in manufactured wars where a pot of gold awaits political leprechauns, those tricky greedy guys. The ideologically duped are to be buried once again, figuratively and literally, beneath a fading hope of fractured cause. This war in Iraq will not achieve its objective because an army can not fight terrorism, only Rambo can, and democracy can not be imposed on hungry people who need to be fed food, not rhetoric. It hurts to see an ill-conceived war upon us again. The cost of wrongful war can bleed a country’s heart for decades.