Flag-Draped Coffins

It's hard to imagine a more cynical policy than the Bush adminstration's refusal to allow publication of photographs of returning battle dead. We can only see celebrations at incoming aircraft carriers with hoopla and presidential speeches. The Pentagon has no particular excuse for this, or for their refusal to announce wounded soldiers unless a death is also included. We all know why; it is to keep the public from the pain of war. The Bush administration remembers that the Somalia debacle, with its 20 or so flag-draped coffins coming into Dover, shocked the public. Clinton, however, stood there and received the dead. Bush, it seems, is ashamed to go.

Most Americans don't know that we are getting almost a dozen bodies a week sent back -- Pat Tillman is one of the first real casualties most Americans have seen. Tillman's death in Afghanistan moved me. Very few men are turning their back on so much when they volunteer. It puts the adminstration's dishonesty about Iraq in such stark relief. Tillman was fighting the right war in Afghanistan. But pity the, now hundreds, of volunteers who have died in Iraq because Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to convince a skeptical public and Congress into supporting the decision to go to war in March 2003. How tragic to take the sort of bravery and patriotic commitment of a young man like Tillman and waste it for the vanity of Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney.

I am, today, more than a little bitter about the cost of Bush's war.