Last month, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., spoke at a rally in Ames, Iowa, and said:
We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and on which we've now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.
Sen. Obama quickly apologized for using the word "wasted":
"Even as I said it, I realized I had misspoken," Obama said. "It is not at all what I intended to say, and I would absolutely apologize if any (military families) felt that in some ways it had diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice that they'd shown."
Obama repeated this apology in a later interview:
Obama said: "I was actually upset with myself when I said that, because I never use that term."
"Their sacrifices are never wasted," he said.
That whole episode had more to do with political theater than with the intent or content of what the senator actually said. This stylized ritual — statement; worst-possible reading of statement by political opponents; demand for apology based on that reading; apology — oozes with insincerity from start to finish.
Act II of this particular drama began last night, when Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the following on CBS' Late Show With David Letterman:
"Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be," McCain said Wednesday … "We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives."
This was followed, of course, by a Democratic National Committee spokesperson demanding that McCain apologize. Lather, rinse, repeat. McCain dutifully played his role in the ritual today:
"Last evening, I referred to American casualties in Iraq as wasted," McCain says. "I should have used the word, sacrificed, as I have in the past. No one appreciates and honors more than I do the selfless patriotism of American servicemen and women in the Iraq War. We owe them a debt we can never fully repay. And America’s leaders owe them, as well as the American people, our best judgment and honest appraisal of the progress of the war, in which they continue to sacrifice.
"As I have said many times, I believe we have made many mistakes in the prosecution of the war … and we have paid a grievous price for those mistakes in the lives of the men and women who have died …"
Mistakes were made and as a consequence, American service members died. Their deaths, Sen. McCain says, are a "sacrifice," but not a waste. "Their sacrifices are never wasted," Sen. Obama says. And no one must ever suggest that the death of any soldier is a waste.
Bollocks.
Senseless death is as old as senseless war. Soldiers' lives have been wasted by generals, kings and presidents since the dawn of time. This waste has been a constant of human history ever since Raamses II said, "Look at that, you men should follow them across." See also: Ypres, Gallipoli, etc.
Soldiers' lives have been wasted again and again due to the ineptitude, foolishness and stupidity — tactical, strategic, diplomatic — of their leaders. It has happened before, all over the world. It is happening now, all over the world. It will happen again.
This is irrefutable. It is also, apparently, unmentionable. And thus it is inevitable. Because we are not allowed to mention it, we are not allowed to consider how to avoid it or prevent it.
Two leading senators, one from each party, have used the word "wasted" and yet we are not allowed to ask if their use of this term might, in any sense, be accurate. All we can manage to ask is whether or not the senators will offer an apology to anyone who might take offense at the possibility that soldiers' lives — in this particular case, or ever, even in the abstract — might have been sacrificed for naught, i.e., wasted.
This is lethal foolishness.
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