Evil of war brings unending pain, by Andrew Greely

[cassiepriam]

I usually do not start threads, so I apologize if I have done this incorrectly. I love Father Greely and this article is so right on, I wanted others here at DU to see it! Here are some excerpts from the article...


Evil of war brings unending pain

March 10, 2006

BY ANDREW GREELEY

Every time I see a picture of an American killed in Iraq, I wince. I think of the agony that the death will cause, shattering, rending, paralyzing pain, and the stress and the strain it will introduce into family relationships. I wonder if the family will ever be free from this suffering. In most cases, it probably will; mourning will replace grief, more or less. In some families, the trauma will be too much, the guilt and anger and magical thinking will persist and blaming will increase -- purgatory now, self-created purgatory. The rationalization that he (or she) died defending American freedom, given bravely to the privacy-violating TV journalist, sounds hollow and will seem more hollow as the years go on.

And what of the Iraqi lives, the men and women and children killed so casually by their own kind and even by Americans? On a day when 50 Iraqis are killed, but no Americans, we tend to breathe a sigh of relief. Iraqi grief is not the same as American grief. The Muslim "rag heads" have brought the disaster on themselves. Besides, their noisy lamentations are not in good taste. Yet if we believe in American religion we must mourn with them too as best we can.

Why 2,200 Americans dead? The reasons keep changing -- Iraqis were probably involved in the Sept. 11 attack, they possessed huge stores of weapons of mass destruction, we had to get rid of Saddam Hussein, we have to keep our promises to the Iraqi people, we must keep faith with those Americans who have already died. We must establish democracy in the Middle East.

The real reasons for the war are too harsh to be fully accepted. The vice president wanted to tighten up on civil liberties. The secretary of defense wanted to wage a new kind of war. The neoconservative memo writers wanted to take pressure off of Israel. "Our president" wanted to reap the glory of being a wartime president. The majority of Congress wanted to be seen as patriotic Americans. Many, perhaps most, Americans wanted revenge for the World Trade Center attack. Many, perhaps most, Americans believed that the war in Iraq was part of the "war on terrorism."

The only consolation the grief-stricken families can fall back on is that their lost love died doing his or her duty. This is certainly the truth, and it is certainly an admirable way to die. Some of the families already want to know why a death at the hands of a roadside bomber or a suicide bomber was a necessary duty. One can only pray that God brings peace to them. As for those who caused the war, how can they sleep at night?



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[jbfam4]

1. I was just going to post this excellent article.

Fr. Greeley tells it like it is...sad, but true.

[applegrove]

2. They thought they could get away with it if the average person was

not asked to sacrifice in any way. Real human beings do not accept that role, they empathize. Nefarious types think empathy is some sorta weird thing that hangs needlessly around normal humans. They miss the point that our empathy is who we are. It is the thing that separates us from the "greater apes". Nefarious types run around trying to get glory and adulation.. because they cannot feel satisfied within themselves. We are not like them. And we will always turn on them. Because they are incapable of representing us.