I thought this editorial by di VITTORIO ZUCCONI from
La Repubblica on the funerals of the Italian casualties was poignant. Here's a couple of paragraphs.
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Anyone who watched the nearly intolerable marathon broadcast by Italian television of tears shed in mourning, particularly the tears trickling from the eyes of family members, cannot help but contrast this spectacle with the severe, almost Puritan, frigidity with which American media and officialdom have greeted the news out of Iraq of daily casualties over the last eight months....Despite a vast library of funereal music, someone in management chose American composer Samuel Barber's
Adagio for Strings, the harrowing piece chosen by Oliver Stone for his film,
Platoon, which depicts the most senseless massacre in Indochina.
The Americans, who have tolerated 420 killed in action, 3,000 wounded, 1,200 amputees and unstated losses due to the desert, stress, and fatigue, are no less human than we are. American mothers cry over the coffins of their sons as we do. The children of Baghdad love the Marines as those of Nassiriya loved our Carabinieri. But the Americans know, or claim to know, why they went into Iraq and therefore why their infantrymen, their tank crews, their aviators and their police die. They went to fight a war, win it and remove a regime which their government had declared dangerous to the security of America. It's a waste of time to discuss whether their evidence was falsified, whether their plans were intelligent or whether the post-war phase was thought out. The US national consensus leading to the dispatch of American troops to die is clear-cut and for this reason remains solid as once remained solid for a decade in Vietnam before the truth dislodged the lies.
Unlike us, the Americans debated and set things straight before the worst happened; they did not sit around and wait for the death certificate before asking themselves with a knot in their throat and the affected piety of talkshow tears if, this this time, once again, it wasn't better to think over before it was too late.