“Mother whose heart hung humble as a button

On the bright splendid shroud of your son,

Do not weep.

War is kind”

Written at the cusp of the twentieth century, Stephen Crane’s poignant words may ring true for the naïve youths captivated by glory promising Army commercials peppered throughout popular TV sitcoms. To those whom the poem actually addresses, it echoes with cruel irony.

As the number of soldiers wounded and killed in Iraq grows larger, the number of victims at home multiplies exponentially. The mothers, fathers, spouses, children, siblings, friends and colleagues of soldiers are all forever affected by the consequences of the conflict. The gestalt of victory is built from thousands of personal losses. The kind of losses no supranational organization inspector can measure or qualify. The kind of losses that are brandished behind closed doors of private homes rather than on the six o’clock news.

No formal acknowledgment from a faceless institution can amend them. Pay cannot heal depression or a torn body, praise cannot raise the dead. It is only the acceptance of responsibility and appropriate consequences that can come close to mending the relationship between the government and those who suffered in or because of the War in Iraq.

The decision to go to war was not an honest mistake. The plan for attacking Iraq was carefully prepared and presented by the most prominent American statesmen and they should be held accountable for what was a conscious failure to protect those who trusted them.

Maybe the mothers who lost their children and the children who lost their fathers could make peace with the war- if there was a justification for it. The truth is that there was no Just Cause for going to war against Iraq. It certainly cannot be qualified as a defensive war. Iraq showed no intentions of a military attack on the United States. The pretext that it was necessary to use force to stop great human rights abuses is also suspicious. If that were the real motive, we would have troops occupying half of Africa. And enough has been said about the weapons of mass destruction (or lack thereof) that it is safe to say that helping the Russians find ones they cannot account for may have been more accurate.

The war has caused unnecessary suffering to thousands of Americans, but who is to be held accountable? Should the Administration bear the blame? Or should it be the Congress which approved the war, theoretically acting as an instrument of the people?  Or does a share of the culpability lie with the voters who elected both?

The varying degrees of responsibility can be distributed among multiple actors. The distribution of responsibility is complex and the authority to allocate it problematic. Consequently the general trend among the American public has been to avoid the issue. With governmental and self-imposed checks on media outlets in place, we have grown accustomed to averting our eyes from the effects of the war. It is ironic that while we wage relentless warfare against the strangers who have done us harm, we are quick to overlook the stern mistakes made by our leadership. Again and again we easily forgive the transgressions it has made against our own people.

Is the trend a political representation of the values of a self-proclaimed Christian nation? Hardly.

As Jesus reminded his followers in Luke 17:3, “"If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him”.

The American people are yet to seriously rebuke the government. And repentance on the part of the current leadership would probably be one of the signs of the Apocalypse. Those bearing the burden of the war deserve more than lip service. In the short term, they deserve a formal apology and reparations where they are appropriate. In the long term, they deserve the security that the mistakes made will not be repeated. This responsibility is shared by us, the voters. It is our duty to not support or re-elect those who, while pursuing personal gains, send innocent people in harm’s way or as Thomas McGrath wrote in 1972,

“While…the lying famous corrupt
Senators mine our lives for another war.”