The Consequences of War

Here in the United States, we've been spared the real consequences of war. Our media and government censor the images that are shown on television news and, until recently, even the returning bodies of soldiers in flag-draped caskets. But Iraqis have not been spared the real consequences of war. Thousands of thousands of Iraqis remain missing. The number of missing isn't clear. Many bodies are hidden in mass graves that are discovered every once in awhile. Other bodies remain in morgues, yet to be identified. According to an article in The New York Times today:

Dr. Munjid Salah al-Deen, the manager of Baghdad’s central morgue, said his staff was working to identify 28,000 bodies from 2006 to 2008 alone.("Fate of Missing Iraqis Haunts War's Survivors," by Timothy Williams and Suadad Al-Salhy, The New York Times, May 24, 2009)

The article opens with a story of a mother of seven children, six who are still alive, the seventh, a thirteen-year-old who went out to buy vegetables one afternoon and never returned home. The mother has exhausted her life savings searching for her son. Sometimes I stop and think of the original act that started us on a trajectory into war with Iraq--the loss of those original 4,000 or so lives in the Twin Towers and on those planes. Those terrorist actions were horrendous, evil. But has the loss of life since then--the war in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of homeless Iraqis, what's probably hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and the lives of American soldiers worth the cost? The answer to many of us in this country may come easily as we salute the flag and hear "The Star-Spangled Banner" sung on this Memorial Day Weekend. But the answer is not so easy for those who have borne the consequences of a war that was peddled in bad faith. The obscenity of that war goes beyond the bodies to the living, a mother searching for a lost son, a woman whose family survives by recycling aluminum cans they find in a nearby dump. Or what about the soldier home from war but unable to find a job, perhaps physically disabled or suffering from PTSD? Yes, we should remember the dead, memorialize their sacrifice. But we also should damn well do all we can to take care of the living.