In New Hampshire over the weekend, Barack Obama told an audience that “we ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”<\/p>\n
It was a well-received comment in a well-received speech. No one seemed to think much of it, right up until several far-right observers said, “Wasted?”<\/p>\n
Conservative blogs pounced<\/a>, mainstream reporters caught wind of the outrage, and Obama backpedaled<\/a> yesterday, saying, “I realized I had misspoken,” even as he uttered the words.<\/p>\n Senator Barack Obama of Illinois said Monday that he had misspoken when he suggested that the lives of more than 3,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq had been “wasted.”<\/p>\n As he arrived in New Hampshire, Mr. Obama said he would “absolutely apologize” to military families if they were offended by a remark he made in Iowa while criticizing the Bush administration’s Iraq policy.<\/p>\n “What I would say — and meant to say — is that their service hasn’t been honored,” Mr. Obama told reporters in Nashua, N.H., “because our civilian strategy has not honored their courage and bravery, and we have put them in a situation in which it is hard for them to succeed.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That’s a fair response. Sometimes, the quickest way to make a mini-flap go away is to acknowledge poor word choice, apologize, and move on. The matter is resolved; there’s not much more for Obama’s critics to whine about.<\/p>\n But I’m wondering: is what Obama said that<\/i> bad? That said, at a certain level, some of this is difficult to get around. The war in Iraq did not need to be fought. The president made a tragic, painful mistake, and compounded it with four years of additional heartbreaking mistakes. Doesn’t this mean that lives are being “wasted” in Iraq?<\/p>\n In this context, “waste” isn’t defined as having been drained of meaning. The lives of the troops — their honor, their courage, their willingness to heroically put their lives on the line — are imbued with value by virtue of their decisions. But it’s not necessarily offensive to their memory to question the value of what they were asked to do.<\/p>\n
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\nObviously, the notion that Americans who make the ultimate sacrifice for their country are “wasted” deaths is discomforting. It suggests that their lives have been lost in vain. No matter what anyone thinks of the war, it’s painful to think Americans have died for no reason, or worse, for a bad reason.<\/p>\n