Sending Children to Die

I can no longer bear it. Even at the risk of being misunderstood. Of committing a gaffe of some magnitude or other - - a breach of some protocol, for instance, that I may not have heard of. Or, of some unwritten rule whose provenance no-one remembers anymore.

I want a simple question put to the President. Not by me, but by a journalist of some weight. The question would be asked in one of the President’s regular nationally televised press conferences. Ted Koppel would more than do. I used to know him well enough to measure him in high regard. He is smart, of course, but, more than that, he has a gift for neutrally asking the core questions that evoke insights we require in a democracy. Something else, of course, commends Ted to the task that I have in mind. He has read on the air the names of all of the young Americans who have lost their lives in Iraq – twice he has done this – the first time sustaining a torrent of criticism for his trouble.

The other television networks in one way or another have now followed suit, nightly memorializing in small bio-vignettes the barely-begun lives that appear in an imagery of injustice to have been cut as short as the set pieces which memorialize them.

They are dead. Forever dead. All 1665 of them. All 100,000 of the Iraqi men, women, and children as well. Gone. Sons. Daughters. Fathers who never met their children. As if they were discardable. Ephemeral. Units of war room data.

Gone. All of them.

Dying still. Every day. Right up until our inevitable departure, after which, the news theater will go dark and none of us will know what happened next, and we will all forget, our dead and theirs, because that is what we have developed a habit of doing.

“Mr. President. I hope you will not think my question impertinent or improper. I don’t know why you have not been asked this publicly before, and that troubles me as much as the more serious foundation for my question. But, would the war in Iraq have been worth the loss of a single human life, had that life been yours?”