The grieving parents who might yet bring Bush down

[cal04]

(As a parent of four kids, I just want to say God Bless these parents and help them to get through everyday.)

Parents and spouses are supposed to accept their tremendous losses with stoic patriotism, never asking whether a death could have been avoided, never questioning how their loved ones are used to justify more killing. At Patrick McCaffrey's military funeral last week, Paul Harris, the chaplain of the 579th Engineer Battalion, informed the mourners: "What Patrick was doing was good and right and noble...There are thousands, no, millions, of Iraqis who are grateful for his sacrifice."

But Nadia McCaffrey knows better and is insisting on carrying her son's own feelings of deep disappointment from beyond the grave. "He was so ashamed by the prisoner abuse scandal," Ms McCaffrey told the Independent. "He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there."

Freed from the military censors who prevent soldiers from speaking their minds when alive, Lila Lipscomb has also shared her son's doubts about his work in Iraq. In Fahrenheit 9/11, she reads from a letter Michael mailed home. "What in the world is wrong with George, trying to be like his dad, Bush. He got us out here for nothing whatsoever. I'm so furious right now, Mama."

Fury is an entirely appropriate response to a system that sends young people to kill other young people in a war that never should have been waged. Yet the American right is forever trying to pathologise anger as something menacing and abnormal, dismissing war opponents as hateful and, in the latest slur, "wild-eyed". This is much harder to do when victims of wars begin to speak for themselves: no one questions the wildness in the eyes of a mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter, or the fury of a soldier who knows that he is being asked to kill, and to die, needlessly.

Many Iraqis who have lost loved ones to foreign aggression have responded by resisting the occupation. Now victims are starting to organise themselves inside the countries that are waging the war. First it was the September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, which speaks out against any attempt by the Bush administration to use the deaths of their family members in the World Trade Centre to justify further killings of civilians. Military Families Speak Out has sent delegations of veterans and parents of soldiers to Iraq, while Nadia McCaffrey is planning to form an organisation of mothers who have lost children in Iraq.

American elections always seem to swing on some parental demographic or other; last time it was soccer moms, this time it is supposed to be Nascar dads. On Sunday, Nascar champion Dale Earnhardt Junior said that he had taken his buddies to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and that "it's a good thing as an American to go see". It seems as if there may be another demographic that swings this election: not soccer moms or Nascar dads but the parents of victims of the war. They don't have the numbers to change the outcome in swing states, but they might just change something more powerful: the hearts and minds of Americans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1258117,00.html

[Ironpost]

1. Maybe just maybe

something good could come out of this war. Maybe some other countries who are on the brink of war will see how senseless that killing is, maybe just maybe.

[loathesomeshrub]

2. No other nation that is civilised would ever do what Bush did n/t