McCain and Obama Apologize Needlessly for Saying Lives Wasted in Iraq

Posted on March 2, 2007
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Why do good men fall all over themselves to apologize for telling the truth?
On Letterman Wednesday night John McCain while announcing his run for the presidency said:

Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be,” McCain said about the Iraq War. “We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives.
Quote via ABC News

Barack Obama is quoted in a 2/13/07 MSNBC post:

During a campaign trip to Iowa over the weekend, the Illinois senator told a crowd: “We now have spent 400 (b) billion dollars and have seen over three-thousand lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”

Now these two are saying that they meant something else, saying what they should have said, and then banging on the tired theme that protects politicians from all harm, “I support the troops.”

My Apple - Oxford American Dictionary defines waste this way:

1. used or expended carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose :

To my reading, these two spoke truth at a time when the whole subject of the war in Iraq has been treated like some sacred cow.

If one has to say in a positive way what our soldiers died for, they died and were maimed for duty. That is a very honorable cause, especially in the military. Our soldiers do not get to pick their wars. Some might believe in the cause for which they fight, but that is secondary to duty. A soldier does their duty as laid out in the chain of command, starting with the Commander-In-Chief.

Obama seems to have shifted to the word “sacrifice.” It has a bit of the root of “sacred” in it. I agree that what is lost is sacred. But that only supports the sense of the waste of it.

What would be offensive to me is if you declared that the soldiers wasted their own lives by the choices they made. No one ever said that. They chose the military to serve. Even those who joined for reasons other than civic or patriotic duty, joined, taking a dangerous job to improve their lives through exposure to broader experiences, leadership, training, and educational benefits.
No one is saying they made bad choices, were not honorable, or wasted their lives.

The promise inherent in each of these young lives was used carelessy by cynical leaders who had never taken the same risks themselves. It was extravagant to expend so many resources, the greatest of these, human, to achieve so little.

We can only believe that the administration, who committed our young people’s lives to this war, had no purpose — or at least no honest or honorable purpose, as each stated purpose, WMD, terrorism, even establishing a western-style democracy with the implied individual freedoms, has been discredited.

What a waste.