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It is encouraging that some American politicians, such as Senator Feingold, are starting to wake up from the sleepwalk that took the nation into a war based on lies.
However, while Feingold accurately calls the absence of the missing Iraq debate in the Congress "deafening", there's something about his article which is also remarkable for its absence. He talks about the many American casualties of the war; those who have already been injured or killed, and those who will be. Certainly every one of them has been, or will be, sacrificed in vain.
But when recounting the costs, shouldn't there be some recognition of the far greater number of innocent Iraqis who have been injured or killed as a result of this catastrophe? It will never be known exactly, but the dead already number at least in their tens of thousands; and there are many, many lives yet to be cut short or maimed as a result of destroyed infrastructure, scattershot fire by US troops, torture, depleted uranium, and insurgent attacks. The suffering will go on for long after the last US soldier has left the country.
Perhaps it's too early in the war to ask even critical US politicians to pay some attention to lives of foreigners, but the lack of the merest acknowledgement of such in this context is jarring. I am reminded of the manner in which Americans usually recount the dead of the Vietnam war -- remembering the 58,000 Americans, but not the the two to three million Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laosian lives that that other unnecessary, stupid, bloody blunder cost.
Feingold writes, "We owe each and every one of these soldiers, and their families, and the nation they serve, serious congressional debate and action." That is true, but you owe something more.
