Guilt

James Reston, Jr. (also a Vietnam Vet) sums it up in a USA Today editorial that I'm just going to quote at length:

When guilt applies

Metaphysical guilt means that every human being is responsible for injustices committed anywhere in the world, but especially crimes that are committed in our presence and with our knowledge. Does this apply to us? The legitimization of torture is one instance that seems to fit. It has been done in our presence, with our knowledge. Or the scrapping of the Geneva Conventions. When both a nation and an American citizen acquiesce in the dissolution of accepted moral norms, metaphysical guilt applies.

The two other categories, moral and political guilt, are most pointedly relevant at this stage of the Iraq conflict. It is not enough to complain about
President Bush, or to mock him. To mock the president does not relieve one from responsibility for the war being fought in the name of every American. Bush's disaster has become the country's disaster. Every American is now connected to it politically and morally. We cannot be indifferent to the scorn for all things American that characterizes the worldview of us. We must pay attention. It should move us.

In our safe zone, the hypocrisy toward our troops is another instance of moral and political guilt. When a person flaunts his patriotism and then tolerates the exploitation of soldiers, then that citizen is morally culpable for that outrage and a participant in it. Even during the Vietnam War, when I was a soldier for three years, no soldier was sent back to the jungle against his will for second and third tours.

Pact with our troops

There existed then, in that "immoral war," a solemn pact between the soldier and his country that was honored by the military and accepted by the soldier, even as the war was winding down toward humiliation. That pact was especially important in the years of 1969-75, when it was clear that the Vietnam War was lost, and that young men were being asked to die simply to extricate politicians from their blunders.

And so it is now. No one talks of a noble cause any longer, especially our troops. Young men are recruited merely with appeals to their testosterone. When the highest military officers now warn that this conflict is breaking the military system, it is because this honorable bond between the country and the soldier at risk is being broken. The general populace, despite the horrifying spectacle of severed limbs and wasted minds, seems indifferent. Didn't these boys and girls sign up for this? Such a question conveniently separates the citizen from the soldier.

As for political guilt, all citizens bear the responsibility for the way their country is governed. They are, therefore, liable collectively for the political decisions of those leaders they have elected, regardless of whether one voted for the winner. In the elections of 2002 and 2004, the Democrats might have halted the rush to war, but they deliberately avoided the subject. This lack of resistance permitted this war to be fought and funded as it was. The Democrats of 2002 and 2004 must share in the political and moral guilt for the calamity.

The 2006 elections was the first time the political and moral aspect of the Iraq debacle was joined. In the next election, that connection will be even more pivotal. If there is no collective grief about what has happened in Iraq, and no collective determination to change course, if the hollow drumbeat for victory and continuing war wins out over withdrawal, then that, at the very least, will define what and who we have become, as a nation, as a people, and as individuals.

Bush has committed so many tragedies, but not without complicity on several levels. Perhaps even worse than Bush's actions, have been the actions of his bloviating enablers who follow his policies without question and then go that extra mile, and posture themselves as the sole repository of knowing what it means to be a patriot. Having so blatantly and tangibly hitched themselves to this disastrous wagon they have become cult-like in their cognitive dissonance. It gets displayed every time a guy who is educated in Ancient Greek History tries to contort the United States into poor little Sparta (ancient land of male strippers) circa 4th Century B.C. and via countless other wankers.