Pointless

There is one parallel between Vietnam and Iraq and it is pointed out in today's LA Times by the surviving sister of a lost marine during Vietnam:

Today, I'm struck by the extent to which I cannot bring myself to believe that Jim's rationale for becoming a Marine factored in the grand ideals of dying for America's freedom, of liberating the oppressed or the other noble causes touted then and now.

Rather, I think he naively accepted the warrior worship he'd been fed by superiors about all of those so-called heroes who preceded his trip home in a coffin.

I miss Jim unremittingly, and wish I could ascribe a higher purpose to his death.

But I know now, having shared many long emotional conversations with Marines who were there that night, having watched another three decades of history unfold, that he died for this cause only: To buy time.

Jim and those eight other young men bought another night for their fellow Marines. That was honorable.

But their deaths, combined with all those thousands of others, also bought more months for the American civilian and military leaders to harass a determined insurgent enemy; for then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to lose faith that the war was winnable, let alone justified; for Henry Kissinger to muddle through the Paris talks toward Richard Nixon's "peace with honor."

And now, each time I read about another soldier blown apart by a roadside bomb, I recoil from this sickening paradox: That it took all those sons' and brothers' deaths to buy enough time for Americans to finally weary of politicians' pep talks and end a pointless war.

We just got another pointless pep talk (the same damn pep talk for 30 months) on Thursday.

When the left gets pilloried for being unpatriotic about war, think who the real cynical criminals are. It isn't those marchers killing time by killing kids.