A confession: Early in 2003 I wanted the war in Iraq.
Looking back on it now, I can absolve myself of blame; I was hoodwinked by the mainstream media, I tell myself. I believed what I was told, what we told the world. The newspaper articles and the television reports and the stern warnings from Colin Powell. I believed all of it. My blood was up. I wanted war. My friends went out and marched in massive movements of people through Hollywood and I tut-tutted their liberal peacenik aspirations. We didn't talk about it. They knew how I felt, I knew how they felt, and we each believed the other wrong.
But only one of us was wrong.
While I do not bear this responsibility solely, or even in large part, I do bear some responsibility for it. It is the necessary obligation of citizens in a democracy to be ever vigilant. Vigilance requires equal measures of fanatic belief and skepticism. I abandoned the later for the former, and so erred. I lied to myself, and others died.
Now, as if the wheels of the sidereal clock have oddly tuned themselves to the tide of human affairs, the 3000th American solider dies in Iraq on the final day of 2006, a year which, historians will note later, saw the inevitable turning of the tide against the war. This will be the second American defeat (not counting the War of 1812), and will have occurred for much the same reasons, because it was fought by much the same people.
I am old enough to remember Walter Cronkite, whom, every Friday evening through the later 1960s and early 1970s, would count out the toll of the American dead for the week. Always something like fifty young American men, dead in the swamps of Southeast Asia. And now, watching the delayed broadcast of The News Hour in my Sydney flat, I watch, at the end of the broadcast, as they show us the photographs of the newly dead in Iraq. Men and women. But all American.
I stopped looking at the photographs long ago. I can't bear to look at their smiling faces, because I know that i helped to kill them.