Who Will Apologize to Grieving Parents of Fallen Soldiers for Mistaken Iraq War?
Now that President Obama has declared the Iraq war officially over, who will apologize for this mistake? Will the White House have anything to say to the Iraqi people for wrecking their country, killing more than 100,000 civilians, and destroying a city with two thousand years of history?
Perhaps Americans cannot be expected to mourn the losses of women and children in far off Iraq through what we have learned to call "collateral damage" Bytheway, that military term means that your toddler gets blown to smithereens. All that may still be recognizable is one bloody finger and the plumbing pipes in what was once your home.
A student once announced in a class discussion about the Middle East, that "those people don't feel the loss of a child the way we do. They do not value their children the way we do ours." In having failed so miserably in my job of trying to broaden the range of that student's humanity, I cried myself to sleep that night. But I also gained an insight, an "ah-ha" moment. That's precisely the way humans have always fought wars, making the horrors we instill on innocent civilians seem trivial.
Okay. So let's get more local. The grief of American mothers and fathers who loss a child to this war will be compounded infinitely when they finally face the truth. This war had no meaning or strategic significance whatsoever. It had nothing to do with the 9/11 tragedy. Their precious children could just as well have died in a senseless Columbine or Virginia Tech-style mass shooting. Who in the White House or Congress, who forced this war upon America will apologize to those grieving parents?
RELATED: Mothers, Sons & Newt Gingrich
Perhaps Americans cannot be expected to mourn the losses of women and children in far off Iraq through what we have learned to call "collateral damage" Bytheway, that military term means that your toddler gets blown to smithereens. All that may still be recognizable is one bloody finger and the plumbing pipes in what was once your home.
A student once announced in a class discussion about the Middle East, that "those people don't feel the loss of a child the way we do. They do not value their children the way we do ours." In having failed so miserably in my job of trying to broaden the range of that student's humanity, I cried myself to sleep that night. But I also gained an insight, an "ah-ha" moment. That's precisely the way humans have always fought wars, making the horrors we instill on innocent civilians seem trivial.
Okay. So let's get more local. The grief of American mothers and fathers who loss a child to this war will be compounded infinitely when they finally face the truth. This war had no meaning or strategic significance whatsoever. It had nothing to do with the 9/11 tragedy. Their precious children could just as well have died in a senseless Columbine or Virginia Tech-style mass shooting. Who in the White House or Congress, who forced this war upon America will apologize to those grieving parents?
RELATED: Mothers, Sons & Newt Gingrich
