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I'm reading through this post and I'm getting kinda angry about what I read. I feel like I'm about to piss everyone off, but I feel this needs to be said and I hope that someone can agree with me. I don't want to be a cynical asshole but I'm afraid that's where I am.
First of all, isn't the whole, "My friend is more patriotic than your friend" schtick a little uncouth? It wouldn't make a bit of difference if I had 1,000 friends in the Army in Iraq and every last 1,000 of them thought the war was shit; there are tens of thousands of soldiers over there. I was in the military during Gulf War I and I can assure you that some were thrilled to go and some thought the war was bullshit. This whole my-pro-war-soldier-friends-in-Iraq-outnumber-your-anti-war-soldier-friends spiel is tiresome and vice versa. To use this as some sort of patriotic score-keeping is vulgar.
Second, our 1,000 dead pale in comparison to the tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died. If we fancy ourselves members of the human race, then every war death is devastating, especially non-combatant deaths. Remember, Saddam was the supposed to be the bad guy, not the entire nation of Iraq, yet we ignore Iraqi deaths as if we have somehow relegated all Iraqis to the realm of enemy. If we only value American deaths as noteworthy, then our place in this world is unjustified.
We are talking about war, yet we used cliched political sound bites and call it dialogue or debate. Unless we are willing to inflict and endure some verbal wounds and do so intelligently, then we are going to be stuck in intellectual quicksand with no one to blame but ourselves, and the deaths will continue to mount while we arrogantly deride the "other" side as immature, ignorant, or unpatriotic. This elementary bickering dishonors everyone who has died in this conflict, and we're all guilty of it.
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"I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses
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