War & Sausage

From The Baltimore Sun...

They were men and women serving on the treacherous front lines and working the dangerous supply routes. They were 19-year-olds out of high school and "weekend warriors" old enough to be their fathers.

They died for America and Americans. That they were ill-served and exploited by the government that sent them into action has nothing to do with their sacrifice.

From The National Catholic Reporter...

More than two years into a war that was supposed to be quick and easy, and the justification for which has spun from removing a dictator to eliminating weapons of mass destruction to fighting terrorism and, finally, to planting democracy that would then spread across the Middle East, Iraq is in chaos. --snip--

We are reminded once again of the severe limits of overwhelming force. The takeover of a country that had been militarily defeated in 1991, bombed constantly for the next 12 years and thoroughly compromised economically has yielded little in return for the carnage required. This has not been a quick and easy war; the results, as once presumed, are not guaranteed.

From The Associated Press...

The president's tribute at Arlington came in sharply different circumstances from the Memorial Day visit Bush made to the cemetery's Tomb of the Unknowns two years ago, just as the nation's problems stemming from the Iraq war were becoming apparent.

Before his Memorial Day remarks in 2003, Bush had declared major combat operations at an end, the U.S. government confidently predicted that weapons of mass destruction would be found and American generals said troops were in the process of stabilizing Iraq.

From The Minneapolis Star Tribune...

In exchange for our uniformed young people's willingness to offer the gift of their lives, civilian Americans owe them something important: It is our duty to ensure that they never are called to make that sacrifice unless it is truly necessary for the security of the country. In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed them; we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let them.

In the 1960s it was Vietnam. Today it is Iraq. Let us resolve to never, ever make this mistake again. Our young people are simply too precious.

From Dictionary.com...

WAR

[Middle English warre, from Old North French werre, of Germanic origin; see wers- in Indo-European roots.]

Word History: The chaos of war is reflected in the semantic history of the word war. War can be traced back to the Indo-European root *wers-, "to confuse, mix up." In the Germanic family of the Indo-European languages, this root gave rise to several words having to do with confusion or mixture of various kinds. One was the noun *werza-, "confusion," which in a later form *werra- was borrowed into Old French, probably from Frankish, a largely unrecorded Germanic language that contributed about 200 words to the vocabulary of Old French. --snip--

Meanwhile another form derived from the same Indo-European root had developed into a word denoting a more benign kind of mixture, Old High German wurst, meaning "sausage."

War and Sausage.

Mixture. Confusion. Chaos.

We all know now that the Chinese character for chaos also signifies opportunity. A few brave editorial boards have now spoken, and one of them has finally called George W. Bush a liar.

Our American media, once considered the standard bearer for a civilized planet, stands today at the corner of confusion and opportunity. Yes, the choice echoes the Lady and the Tiger...

But doing/saying nothing is infinitely worse than taking a stand.

The result will not be a benign mixture.