A cause they've long ago forgotten

The war goes on and on. The Democrats disappoint in their first '08 debate. Plus: Where are the black soap-opera superstars?

By Camille Paglia

Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Camille Paglia, Rosie O'Donnell, Opinion, Barack Obama, Mitt Romney

May 9, 2007 | The front page of last Friday's Philadelphia Inquirer was dominated by a stunning color photo of a row of mourners at a military funeral at nearby Willow Grove Naval Air Station. The ceremony honored a resident of Doylston, Penn., Marine 1st Lt. Travis Manion, age 26, who was killed the prior weekend near Fallujah on his second tour of duty in Iraq.

Manion's sister and mother, holding small American flags, openly weep, while his father, Thomas Manion, a Marine Reserve colonel in full dress uniform sits stoically with his eyes closed and hands folded. Another photo shows Manion's silver casket being carried by a six-man honor guard from the military helicopter.

The Inquirer notes that this was "a scene the Pentagon has often taken pains to shield from public view during the Iraq war. It was displayed at the request of Manion's family, who cast the day as a celebration of his return."

The eulogy, before a crowd of 200, was given by Brig. Gen. R. David Papak, commanding general of the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing, who declared, "Welcome home, warrior. It's absolutely an honor to be a part of your homecoming."

As I grappled with this impressive phrase (does "homecoming" truly apply to the dead?), I contemplated the striking photo of Manion, handsome and debonair in his battle gear. All of that energy, intelligence, discipline and training extinguished in a moment.

The melody from a classic 1960s song, Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair," floated piercingly into my mind. The traditional English folk ballad that is its core consists of a message sent by a dying young man to his "true love" back home whom he will never see again. The festivity of Scarborough Fair represents the joys of life that are fading for him, just as the symbolic herbs of the haunting refrain ("parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme") represent memory as well as nature's fertility, here truncated by early death.

Into this beautiful, elegiac song, Simon and Garfunkel brilliantly inserted a "canticle," interwoven as a countermelody. Out of the pastoral imagery of "deep forest green," gently, almost subliminally rise these powerful lines: "War bellows blazing in scarlet battalions/ Generals order their soldiers to kill/ And to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten."

This was an indictment of the contemporary Vietnam War, in which more than 58,000 American soldiers would die. And what did that war actually achieve? It is hard to believe that the generation of the 1960s that now holds power in Washington seems to have learned next to nothing from the disaster of Vietnam, which tore the U.S. apart.

Once again, colossally inept political decisions, based on abstract principles of noble-sounding but naive idealism, have turned dutiful American soldiers into cannon fodder. There is no battlefield in Iraq, no rational strategic alignment -- just a warren of snipers and booby traps where death is random. Conventional warfare failed in Vietnam, whose culture and history the Pentagon never understood or respected, just as conventional warfare cannot succeed in an ethnically divided desert country like Iraq, roiling with competing insurgencies.

The sickening, pointless slaughter in Iraq -- massacres of untold tens of thousands of civilians and a rising toll of American and coalition soldiers -- will obviously continue through George W. Bush's second term and probably well beyond that, no matter which party wins the White House in 2008. Yet the humiliating Western occupation of a Muslim country can only further incite and inflame world terrorism.

Bush seems increasingly passive and hemmed in. We get sporadic declarations of stirring resolution, followed by long, vague periods of desultory indifference, as the dead and severely wounded are shipped undercover stateside. Bush's utter inability to project steady, consistent day-to-day leadership on Iraq certainly betrays his lack of control of this mission from the start.

I find baffling and off-putting the obsession of so many of my fellow Democrats with political strategist Karl Rove (a peripheral blob and dirty trickster), insofar as it takes focus off the real center of gravity in this administration -- Dick Cheney, who has cynically used the vice presidency to govern by proxy. For all its dislike of Cheney, the liberal press seems unable to lay a glove on him. He's like an enigma imploding into a black hole. But history will surely show that moral responsibility for the Iraq debacle belongs principally to Cheney.

Impeachment talk, however, is a counterproductive distraction to the real business of getting the Democratic candidates for president up to speed and in fighting shape. When the Republican candidates gathered for their first debate last week at the Reagan Library in California, I had a shiver of foreboding. Despite their sometimes absurdly overemphatic fist-waving and podium-thumping, the Republicans were light-years ahead of their Democratic counterparts in terms of vigorous assertion and command of the rhetoric of national security and proactive geopolitics.

At their own first debate two weeks ago in South Carolina, the Democratic candidates, in contrast, seemed wary and lackluster. I whooped and literally applauded Dennis Kucinich's bursts of spirited antiwar protest, but Kucinich was most effective when embarrassing his colleagues rather than in demonstrating the ability to cross party lines in the general election.

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