I suspect that for many who oppose the war in Iraq, as I do, each week's news of fresh American casualties prompts a troubling, unvoiced internal dialogue. They feel grief that these lives--many so young--have been violently cut off. But then a thought follows--one well-founded in observation of American politics--that more casualties spell less public support for the war, which therefore may end sooner. At this point a kind of moral seasickness sets in. Have they somehow permitted themselves to let these deaths secretly feed their political hopes--in a sense to rely on them--if only in the secrecy of their own thoughts?
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Certainly, the country's balkanization is more important than the constitutional negotiations, which have now run off the rails and in any case were always more effective as an exercise in managing perceptions in the United States than in building a political order in Iraq. After all, even according to the Bush Administration, "winning" in Iraq must be defined in political terms, as the creation of some kind of Iraqi state that meets American approval. "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," Bush has said. The question, though, is, Stand up for what? An Islamic democracy backed by Iran? A new dictatorship? Three new countries?
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Herein lies the tragedy. The argument-by-casualties, in which X number of deaths costs Bush Y number of approval points in public opinion polls, takes place because the argument-by-words has been missing. A majority of the American public now looks on the war as a mistake, but most of the leaders of the so-called opposition party have failed to articulate an antiwar position. In the resulting silence, only the deaths are speaking. The loss of soldiers' and civilians' lives is the price of the politicians' gutlessness.
This default, including the weakness of the antiwar movement once the war had been launched, is the true and proper source of moral disquiet felt by opponents of the war such as myself in the face of casualties. Yet it is not by antiwar activities but rather by inaction, or failure to act effectively, that those of us in the antiwar movement have entered into a seeming complicity with the killers. They have stepped into the vacuum left by us. The solution of course is not to draw back from opposition to the war but to step it up. Let words and peaceful actions speak instead of guns and corpses.
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