Wars That Unify, And Those That Divide
James O. Goldsborough
San Diego Union-Tribune

May 31, 2004

Has there ever been a Memorial Day like this one?

With the dedication this weekend of the World War II monument on the Washington Mall, we have been reminded of our heroic days. World War II was our grandest moment, the time when Americans joined unanimously to defeat evil regimes bent on world conquest.
All Americans joined in that war. The military draft spared few families with young men. Women stepped in to replace men taken by the draft or to join up themselves. On the home front, we endured rationing and paid for the war through income taxes raised tenfold - to a top rate of 91 percent.

If war can be unifying, World War II was the one. The nation elected Franklin Roosevelt four times, and FDR and his vice presidents would run the nation an astonishing 20 years.

We still celebrate World War II Americans as the greatest generation because the war wed the nation’s immense physical and moral resources to a great and noble cause: The destruction of the most evil forces that ever existed on the planet.

Unlike during World War II, the nation is deeply divided on this Memorial Day, as deeply as on the first Memorial Day, proclaimed by Gen. John Logan, commander of the Army of the Republic, in 1868. The states of the old Confederacy did not honor Memorial Day until after World War I, when it became the day to honor Americans who died in all wars, not just in the Civil War.

A nation united after a tough election by the awful events of Sept. 11, 2001 - a day that brought us support from many nations with cries of “we are all Americans” - today finds itself divided and with little foreign support.

Polls show a nation more polarized than ever before. The partisan gap, reported Pew Research in its 2004 American landscape survey, “has never been more pronounced.” Analyzing polling data from the past half century, UCSD political scientist Gary Jacobson says, “we’ve got the most polarized electorate that we’ve ever seen.”

On Memorial Day we seek to forget all that, to remember Americans who have fallen in wars, which should not be partisan affairs. No matter the war, we must honor our dead. Soldiers do not make wars, they are sent into wars by presidents. Presidents get credit for good wars. They must take blame for bad ones.

When war is wrong, we must never fail to make the distinction between the soldiers who fight it and the civilians who ordered it. The reason the Nuremberg trials are so important in modern history is because their verdict was that responsibility for war crimes goes to the top.

When things go wrong, civilians may try to shift blame to the military, as we have seen with the Abu Ghraib atrocities - “a few bad apples,” said President Bush. But look deeper, and you find civilian responsibility, as we are finding with Abu Ghraib, that goes to the top: secret directives to commanders that violate time-honored prisoner-of-war practices.

Anthony Zinni, a former four-star Marine general and commander of the Central Command in the Middle East, opposed the Iraq War from the beginning. Zinni uses an analogy to explain how citizens can oppose a bad war while still supporting the troops who must fight it:

“There’s one statement that bothers me more than anything else,” said Zinni. “And that’s the idea that when the troops are in combat, everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning, and troops were dying as a result. Well, what’s the difference between a faulty plan and strategy that’s getting just as many troops killed?

Why has no one in the Bush administration stepped forward to take the blame for the terrible situation in which they have put our nation?

We have ample evidence that war was the idea of a cabal of Bush plotters, none of whom has ever worn a uniform; that the nation was deceived about the motives for war; that postwar planning was incompetent; that the treatment of Iraqi prisoners directed by the administration violated international law and American traditions.

We have testimony from people who worked for the administration such as Gen. Zinni, Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson that substantiates the evidence of these abuses and this incompetence.

Why is no one held responsible?

As we honor our war dead today, we honor those fallen in Baghdad just as those that fell at Bull Run, the Marne, Iwo Jima and Normandy. If this war is different from those wars, it is not their doing. They followed orders and made the ultimate sacrifice. We share the grief of their families.

But there is fault for this war which must be placed. Those responsible will be called to account by history. If we are true to ourselves, they must also be called to account by voters.

What is required between now and November is for members of the Bush administration - those responsible for what Zinni calls the “faulty plan and strategy” behind the war, to do the honorable thing.

Lyndon Johnson did it in 1968 after most of his Cabinet was already gone. There is precedent.

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