Truly though: Iraq war is a sad waste

By Brian Pierce

About 25 miles north of Baghdad, the small Iraqi town of Tarmiyah sits on the Tigris River in the southern section of the Sunni Triangle. It has, like most of Iraq, seen the horrors of civil war, and last Monday night, it confronted those horrors up close. A coordinated series of three suicide bombs targeting Tarmiyah’s police headquarters was followed by 50 insurgent gunmen firing small arms and throwing grenades.

By the time the chaos subsided and the site was secured, the dust had settled on the spilt blood of two American soldiers and eight Iraqi police officers.

They will have marked the 3,139th and 3,140th deaths of American military personnel killed in the Iraq War.

We can only make educated guesses as to how long the list of Iraqi deaths is to which these eight police officers from Tarmiyah have added their names. And odds are, by the time this column goes to print, these fatalities will not be the most recent to have emerged from the ongoing violence in Iraq.

Feelings about the war varied at its outset varied as they do now. Some of us believed, perhaps naively, in the transformative power of liberal democracy and cheered the military on in its toppling of a brutal dictator. Others were appropriately skeptical of this administration’s competence and commitment. And still others were adamantly opposed to the principle of the United States imposing its will by force.

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Wherever we stood then, times have changed, and the situation has grown more and more bleak.

One small reflection of this new reality is the recent words of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

The day after he announced his candidacy for the presidency, at a campaign rally in Iowa, Obama gave a blistering critique of the Iraq War, saying, “We now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

These words caused quite a stir, and Obama quickly issued multiple apologies for the statement, saying, “It is not at all what I intended to say, and I would absolutely apologize if any (military families) felt that in some ways it had diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice that they’d shown.”

If this were a “news” show on CNN, I would take up the role of political pundit and discuss whether Obama’s apology was politically astute and how it will affect the horse race.

But for the moment, it seems more appropriate to step back and reflect on whether the lives of the two American soldiers who died in Tarmiyah Monday, along with those of their 3,138 (and counting) fallen brothers and sisters in arms, can appropriately be described as “wasted.”

And it is time, for those of us who backed this war in the vain hope that democratic reform would come at the end of the barrel of a gun, to answer that question with the only honest answer: Yes.

This war is being waged in the shadow of the following causes for shame: a misleading and outright false justification based on the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction, purported ties to terrorist organizations, an international humiliation at Abu Ghraib, some of the largest military blunders in history from the dissolution of the Republican Guard to insufficient American ground forces and the outbreak of a civil war stemming from an inability of the elected government to cooperate with the varied political factions. And of course, the 3,140 Americans and the tens of thousands of Iraqis that have been so needlessly killed.

Yes, we must all come around to a cold, cold reality.

Senator Obama can apologize for the truth all he wants, but it remains a sad truth all the same: The lives that have been lost in Iraq yesterday have been wasted, and wasted will be the lives lost tomorrow.