As one who hails from a long line of war­riors, ancient war­riors, Celts and Castil­lians and the mother of an Iraq com­bat vet­eran my view of the futil­ity of war was hard come by. For brief moments when I allowed myself to think about war at all, I accepted that achiev­ing an end by force might some­times be accept­able. Not that I ever felt we should arbi­trar­ily invade a coun­try for régime change but shouldn’t we have inter­vened in Rwanda and stopped the slaugh­ter of a mil­lion Tut­sis by the Hutus? Ought we not be in Dar­fur stop­ping the Jan­jaweed and res­cu­ing the starved and dis­placed families?

The answer is yes but not mil­i­tar­ily. Peace, human­ity and nation build­ing are not the purview of the mil­i­tary as it exists today. Diplo­macy and pol­i­tics and human dig­nity are the only ulti­mate solu­tion. Con­sider these words from car­toon­ist Jeff Danziger, a Viet­nam vet­eran pub­lished in the Boston Globe

THE PENTAGON has lit­tle choice but to begin plan­ning for the with­drawal of US troops from Iraq. The House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives has just passed rules that make a soldier’s sec­ond or third tour in Iraq pos­si­ble only after an equal amount of time has been assigned at home. We don’t have enough troops now, and the House action will mean even fewer troops will be available.

Jour­nal­ists have an inter­est­ing way of illus­trat­ing the dif­fi­cul­ties involved in a with­drawal: If all the trucks, humvees, tanks, semi­trail­ers, and wheeled artillery pieces were lined up in a con­voy down the road south to Kuwait, Time mag­a­zine reported, they would stretch 100 miles. It wouldn’t hap­pen this way of course, but for sheer history-book gee-whiz qual­ity, that would be a photo oppor­tu­nity to equal the heli­copters leav­ing the roof in Saigon.

And appro­pri­ately so. For that photo, which showed the haste and con­fu­sion of Viet­nam with­drawal that occurred almost entirely with­out plan­ning, prob­a­bly hurt US mil­i­tary pres­tige more than any other sin­gle image. Viet­nam proved that wars are a lot eas­ier to get into than out of. If you can get out at all. (empha­sis mine)

Real com­bat vet­er­ans are not so com­mon and while I know hun­dreds of vet­er­ans I know only 30 or so com­bat vet­er­ans includ­ing my son. Though I know there are excep­tions out there, of those men I know stretch­ing from Viet­nam through to Iraq they each agree, to the man, that war makes mat­ters worse, not bet­ter. John, my son, told me once that he wouldn’t wish war upon his worst enemy.

From the LA Times we hear that the surge has failed.

The U.S. mil­i­tary buildup that was sup­posed to calm Bagh­dad and other trou­ble spots has failed to usher in national rec­on­cil­i­a­tion, as the capital’s neigh­bor­hoods rup­ture even fur­ther along sec­tar­ian lines, vio­lence shifts else­where and Iraq’s gov­ern­ment remains mired in polit­i­cal infighting.

In the com­ing days, U.S. mil­i­tary and gov­ern­ment lead­ers will offer Con­gress their assess­ment of the 6-month-old plan’s results. But a review of sta­tis­tics on death and dis­place­ment, polit­i­cal devel­op­ments and the impres­sions of Iraqis who are liv­ing under the height­ened mil­i­tary pres­ence reaches a dispir­it­ing conclusion.

Despite the plan, which has brought an addi­tional 28,500 U.S. troops to Iraq since Feb­ru­ary, none of the major leg­is­la­tion that Wash­ing­ton had expected the Iraqi par­lia­ment to pass into law has been approved.

Nev­er­the­less, we leave our troops in harm’s way. We pre­tend that lev­el­ing cities in con­ducive to nation build­ing. We ignore the signs on the ground, the pleas from the troops them­selves and we pre­tend that we are send­ing our chil­dren off to die for a noble cause. Not only do we send them there but we leave them there ill equipped and ill guided and sit aim­lessly by while Con­gress estab­lishes another com­mit­tee to inves­ti­gate another con­sti­tu­tional vio­la­tion or another outed gay legislator.

Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be war­riors because the Amer­i­can peo­ple really don’t give a damn about them.