No one in this country would contest or doubt the sacrifices made by veterans of the two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, launched by the George W. Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Nor can or should anyone ignore the fact that many of those veterans made the ultimate sacrifice, some permanently maimed, blinded or disfigured as a consequence of fulfilling their duty, and many, of course, by paying with their own lives. Those heroes fallen in the line of their service in particular are every bit as deserving a memorial on our hallowed ground than any killed in Vietnam, Korea, or the two world wars of the 20th century.
What they don’t deserve, however, is to be memorialized in the name of a purely political construct called the “Global War on Terrorism.” In particular, to suggest that the 4431 American troops killed in Iraq died in the pursuance of an amorphous “war on terror” is simply a whitewashing of the genesis and rationale for that war, an attempted justification for something patently unjustifiable. On one level it is an unfortunate consequence of this country’s tendency to reflexively treat its own history as something noble rather than to face a much less pleasant reality. On another level it’s even insidious because, by wrapping itself in a cloak of patriotism, it actually distorts and misrepresents that history.