"Then I went to the NYT's Website and really got lost, body and soul. Some interactive genius has created the saddest, most effective digital monument to this war's cost that I've yet beheld: an ever-changing photo map of tiny squares, each one linking to the life of a dead soldier and the whole forming the bitmapped face of life sacrificed too early and in vain. Behind that are personal stories, some recording into audio files by comrades still living. I've been clicking and reading and and listening and getting sadder by the day.And there's nothing, really, to say.
What's the point of writing yet again about the uselessness of this adventure, its cost in lives and limbs and burned skin and terrorized, battered psyches? Of picking out another failed Bush Administration policy, another anti-American invasion of civil liberties, another poor decision? For what? This keyboard can't bring them back. Their families must go on living without them forever, knowing that their lives were cast away in adventurous frivolity by a bunch of think-tankers and oilmen. Who can say our young men and women are "defending democracy" now, as the shouts of "Moktada! Moktada!" still echo in the American-built death chamber?
We can oppose this phony "surge" on our blogs all we want, but we're still throwing away our own young for a lost and immoral cause - day in and day out, more die needlessly. They die now to protect the ego of the President; they die now because a few old men with names like Cheney and Lieberman and McCain believe that America can't sustain another defeat like Vietnam. Not on their brave, Churchillian watch. No-sir.
Well, we can sustain a defeat. We cannot sustain the bleeding. We will not. This is clear."
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