Memorial Daze, I: The Wrong Way to Support the Troops

In a climate as militarized and lusty for anything in a uniform as our hothouse imperium has become, elegies to the madness have to be taken for granted, even when they appear on Memorial Day, when one assumes that humble mourning rather than jingo celebrations of death are called for, and especially when they appear in the New York Times, second only to the Washington Post as parlor apologist of American boots on other people’s grounds (when they take a break from leaving imprints on other people’s necks). The Times today publishes one such elegy, entitled “The Troops Have Moved On,” by Owen West, “a reserve Marine major who served in Iraq,” the Times tells us, and “the founder of Vets for Freedom.” Vets for Freedom is the sort of web site that, like its Pentagon counterparts, cribs the same camouflage colors and PR hues of soldiers posing with Arab children, though among the 40,000-some Iraqis killed for far, compliments of Operation Iraqi Freedom, it’s a mathematical certainty that more Iraqi children have had the pleasure of dying from American ordnance than have had the honor of posing with GIs to garland the fabrications of Stateside web sites. Knowing of course how the Pentagon’s contractors of deceit, like the Rendon Group, operate, it’s perfectly likely that even those pictures of smiling Iraqi children (which have odd similarities with those rightfully lambasted images of pre-invasion, kite-flying children in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 911”) are as staged, posed, touched up, and faked as every other report of American success that steals its way out of Iraq. So “The Troops Have Moved On.” The headline is news, though it appears on the Op-Ed page of the Times. Moved on from what? Read the rest...