Distilled to its most basic level, war is not about abstract principles like "freedom" or tactical concepts like "acceptable casualties." It is about the willingness of individuals to make a sacrifice that is far too great to be comfortably comprehended by those whose lives are not constantly at risk. For this reason alone the soldiers in Iraq deserve the utmost admiration of both opponents and proponents of the war, but most of all they deserve the respect of the individuals whose decisions placed them in harm's way. Yet the Bush administration has taken repeated and unprecedented steps in an attempt to further their own political goals at the expense of the Americans it has the ultimate charge of protecting.
At home, Bush's economic policies? from his inequitable tax-cuts to his attempts at trade deregulation?have done much to decrease the quality of living for the socio-economic groups to which most men and women in uniform belong. He has also taken steps to degrade the lives of soldiers directly, significantly reducing the health and retirement benefits of active soldiers, extending tours of duty by up to a year, and, as was recently reported by The New York Times, perhaps illegally attempting to recall former G.I.s who are well past even their Individual Ready Reserve requirements.
Most disturbing, however, is the administration's measures to deflect attention from the sacrifice soldiers are called upon to make. Donald Rumsfeld has long barred proper documentation of the dead as they return from war, a measure of respect given to the fallen of every previous conflict. A recent and troubling U.N. report has also noted a discrepancy between the body counts released by U.S. officials?including totals of U.S. casualties?and those compiled by independent organizations. As if to highlight just how off the U.S. estimates of the war's human cost truly are, on Tuesday the Bush-backed Iraqi prime minister Allad Allawi claimed that "no civilian lives had been lost" during the assault on Fallujah. This assertion would have been ludicrous in a war whose civilian casualties total well over 15,000 even if it did not contradict every other report coming from the battle's front line.
The administration's reason for attempting to deflect our attention from the war's human cost is obvious: the images and letters of dead soldiers are difficult to digest precisely because they remove war from any forms of socio-political contextualization and instead remind us that the toll of war can in the end be measured simply by the number of children who have lost a parent and the number of parents who have lost a child. As such, it is much harder to sell an unjust and poorly run war when voters back home are able to put faces to the numbers they see on T.V.
Such political considerations are in no way justification for distorting the facts of war to the point where innocent civilian casualties are not even acknowledged and American casualties are intentionally covered-up by hyperbolic and misleading rhetoric. While skewing the presentation of domestic policies may be a long-standing political tradition, going to such lengths to hide the ugly side of war from the American people asked to shoulder its burden is an entirely new and entirely despicable practice.
The soldiers in Iraq deserve every tiny consideration the government can afford them, especially when they have made the ultimate sacrifice as payment for Bush's disastrous foreign policy. This administration has instead chosen to repeatedly try and make us overlook the one truth that should never be forgotten in war: a body count is not a number to be manipulated but rather a testament to the brave men and women whose voices have been forever silenced.