I had to distract everyone's attention from the debate over the value of the new design, but there's an op-ed in tomorrow's Washington Post that jives with a lot of what kos has been saying here, and I thought it'd be good to share it with everyone. It turns out Richard Cohen finds himself agreeing with Kos on chickenhawks in this war.
More on the Flip
Cohen's piece, found
here, is powerful. I'll just give you an excerpt or two to whet your appetite.
So when Kagan and others talk about "sacrifice," what do they mean? They mean the other guy. This is not actually something new under the sun -- older men have forever sent younger men to war -- but this war is a category unto itself. It's not just that there is no draft -- and none contemplated -- but also that taxes have not been raised and we're not even asked to save paper or aluminum foil or something like that for the war effort. The war is being conducted out there, on television, and although U.S. fatalities are creeping toward 2,000, they are nothing like the numbers from Vietnam (58,000). The sacrificing can continue for years before most of us are asked to sacrifice a thing.
This applies to all of us, but especially to those who cheer this war most vociferously. This war, or any war, is an easy one to support when you don't have to sacrifice a thing. And I think that's one of the problems with this war. No matter what happens in Iraq, no matter how ugly it gets, no matter how grisly the images on tv, we here at home are insulated from it. Some of us realize that this insulation does not change that men and women are suffering and dying and bleeding for a war launched on pretenses that turned out to be false, and justified by pretenses that were invented after the fact. But those cheering this war seem not to. "what do you mean people are dying? This is WAR. We're America." Tough talk, and talk that requires no sacrifices. Not only is Bill O'reilly not being asked to put himself in harms way, he's not even being asked to eat meatloaf, or to give up his tax cut. There just isn't any sacrifice in this war, except for those doing the dying, and their friends and familes suffering through every agonizing, unsure moment while their loved ones are gone.
And this lack of repercussions for those who support it most strongly is killing our country. The Hannity's of the world can spout their mouths off about freedom and liberty and terrorism, and then walk away from the cameras and eat a steak with their loving, healthy, safe family. But as Cohen says, they need to look out the damn window.
Dunne liked to refer to "sunshine patriots" -- those of us who called for others to fight a war we or our children would never fight. This war was conceived by sunshine patriots and directed by them -- and fought for reasons that some in the administration knew were exaggerations or, in some cases (Dick Cheney's nuclear scare-mongering), sheer fabrications. It has become the sorriest of wars, conceived for one reason, fought for another, good enough for others to fight, not good enough for ourselves and, maybe, an awful quagmire in the making. It's time the sunshine patriots looked outside.
It's raining.
Damn straight it is.