This simultaneously brought tears to my eyes and spurred me on to actively, passionatelym and persistently resist this botched, hubris-driven war. From start to end, the piece brims with compassion and clarity. Amen.

Holds up the Warsaw uprising.

Beautifully stated, Gary. What better way to honor our troops than to reflect on the preciousness of their lives and the lives of all the men, women and children who have died or who live in fear so the big boys can play.

I have nothing but the greatest respect for anyone whose job is to die for me, whether or not I asked them to. Soldiers living and dead deserve our respect.

The ones who risk their lives with no risk to themselves deserve our contempt.

If Americans want to bypass Bush and end the war quickly all they need to do is to get the draft reinstated.

Nothing sobers people up like the prospect of their kid getting sent off to Iraq.

The best way to honor our fallen soldiers is to win the war.

is to admit that this fools errand is not winable and get them out of harms way.

All are equal -- not just those who enjoy the privilege of being born in the US -- and endowed with unalienable rights. Whosoever believeth otherwise is perforce our enemy.

However mishandled this war has been, it is a righteous and noble cause. To surrender to thugs is disgrace to those who have already died in the pursuit of human rights justice.

The war can be won. We need to summon the political will to do so, however, and calls for early withdrawal are not helpful.

Next stop: Teheran.

"Those of us who do not believe in Bush's war -- and that is a majority of the people in the country -- owe those who have died in Iraq more than respect and memory. We owe them righteous anger. We owe them outrage over a president so desperate and delusional that he is willing to pay with their blood to delay his day of political reckoning. We owe them our continued commitment to end this futile war.

For they are our comrades, too, even if we never shared a foxhole."

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Yes, yes, yes! My god, yes! Every word. My heart is broken and my face is full of tears. My god yes.

On a hot and sweaty day in July in 1983, I leaned over and put my head onto the black marble of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, and looked at the Washington Monument's reflection in the wall. Back over my right shoulder was the brooding figure of Lincoln, sitting on his chair. The bronze of the Three Servicemen had yet to be erected. At my feet were flowers and flags; notes and mementos had been shoved into the wall. I was 20 years old. Although a serviceman during Vietnam, my father had spent the war dodging Soviet destroyers in the North Atlantic, not running from V.C. in the jungle.

I remember being overpowered by emotion, even though I knew no one who had died in that long, useless war. But more, I remember how glad I was that it was over, long over, and though Reagan was in the White House, and it seemed nuclear holocaust was a knife-edge away, at least young men and women weren't dying in a pointless war half a world away based on lies, deceit, and idiotic theories.

Somehow, I have a hard time imaging Bush, or Cheney, or Rumsfeld, have ever waled down that path to the bottom, where the 10 foot high walls of the dead loom over you, an overwhelming reminder. And now every day, while Bush and Congress fight their absurd political battles, more names are graven on the future Iraq War Memorial wall, more lives are uselessly lost, and some young man or women will walk into that memorial on some hot, future summer's day and wonder, "Why?" And frankly, I won't have an answer.

American soldiers - those at home, those in Afghanistan and Iraq, those staffing the stolen, scattered, strategic outposts of projected American might around the world - are instruments of empire. They embrace and sacralise the myths of American exceptionalism and are prepared to kill on behalf of U.S. hegemony.

I for one do not celebrate these men and women or honour their decision to be gun bearers and missile launchers in the service of American power. I pity them and hold them culpable. U.S. military culture inhabits a position near the apex of the cult of American patriotism. It enables empire. It slaughters your disadvantaged. It consumes over 70% of your taxes and has done so for more than 60 years. It is in unholy conspiracy with the military-industrial-political complex. It is stained in the blood of jingoism and expansion and Machiavellian self interest from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.

One way for progressives to resist American imperialism is to speak the truth of what your soldiers do. Remember and mourn their victims. Condemn the public indoctrination and cultic reasoning that suck youth in and make virtue of their crimes, white of their grey, black, brown and red. Do this on Memorial Day in the face of popular wrath at your breaking the social taboos that help undergird militarism. Delegitimate a career path steeped in authoritarianism and gore. Bring your military home from its global adventurism and restrict it to a tightly controlled defensive role. Expose U.S. imperialism and make it politically unacceptable to the next Bush, the next Reagan, the next Johnson.

How do you decide who should be the last soldier to die for a mistake? This is neither a war that can be won nor a war where our withdrawal necessarily makes anyone less safe. Our very presence in Iraq emboldens our enemies and strengthens their ability to recruit people who want to hurt us. Ronald Reagan left Lebanon when he realized that simply leaving our troops there didn't protect either them or the surrounding populace. Clinton left Somalia when he realized we had no mission there we could perform.

Kamiya is wrong, however, when he says that we fought in Vietnam for people who believed in the domino theory. The release of LBJ's tapes shows that the real justification was far slimmer and more calculated and cynical. Johnson knew, and many war hawks like Richard Russell knew, that Vietnam was unwinnable. Johnson and Russell can be heard agreeing with that just days after JFK's assassination.

They sent half a million Americans into combat and allowed over 50,000 of them to die not to stop the spread of Communism, but so they couldn't be blamed for letting it spread and doing nothing about it.

It is in the nature of our social compact, so long as we have this government, that we ask young men to die essentially without question to follow the policies of democratically elected leaders, right or wrong. Thus, in a way, it is more important to honor the dead of Vietnam and Iraq than the dead of the Civil War or World War II. To paraphrase Lincoln, we must take increased devotion to the cause for which they gave their lives, that a government of the people, by the people and for the people shall replace the scumbag autocrats who rule us now.