Marketing defeat

Jim Wooten in the AJC puts the point home. He starts with a poem by The American poet Archibald MacLeish, who served in World War I and later as Librarian of Congress, wrote a poem that expresses clearly the stakes for this generation in Iraq. It’s called “The Young Dead Soldiers.” The poem:

The young dead soldiers do not speak.

Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?

They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.

They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us.

They say: We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.

They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave.

They say: Our deaths are not ours; they are yours; they will mean what you make them.

They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say; it is you who must say this.

They say: We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say. We have died. Remember us.

And he closes with a scathing assault.

Their deaths mean what we make them. Those who drive the intellectual and political engine of the Democratic Party’s drift to pacifism and appeasement define Vietnam’s deaths as the product of misdirected adventurism. Abandon Iraq now and the lives of young dead soldiers are debris on the desert floor, for the worth of their sacrifice will be defined, as Vietnam was, as misguided adventurism or worse, the product of lies.

This is not a party— the one that coalesced in this nation in the days leading up to last Tuesday — that can be allowed to succeed.

No matter the marketing terminology, no matter the soothing reasonableness of their assurance that they are advocating something other than surrender, no matter their blissful assurance (for they believe it sincerely) that diplomacy and understanding can satisfy the dragon, the policies they advocate keep this nation at risk.

I highly recommend that you go to the AJC article to read the whole thing and read the comments.