To say that US troops killed in Iraq are dying for their country is to do them a profound disservice. The invasion and occupation of Iraq were and remain bad for this country by every measure: moral, financial, diplomatic, military. What the troops are dying for is an epic blunder foisted upon them and us by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith and George W. Bush et al, with the acquiesence of spineless Congressional “leaders” such as Hillary Clinton, hapless cowards such as Colin Powell within the administration, and useful idiots such as “liberal” hawks Thomas Friedman and Jacob Weisberg and Fourth Estate fifth columnist Judith Miller without it.

The notion that our soldiers have died and are dying for anything other than a combination of stupidity, cowardice, arrogance and profit shifts the responsibility from where it belongs, on the individuals who perpetrated this crime against both the US and Iraq, to an abstract concept that can never be held to account. That’s convenient for the accountable, and toxic for the country; it allows those who adopt the trope to retreat behind a platitude and paves the way for future casual acceptance of future murderous stupidities.

Bush is fond of saying that, to borrow from Bill Clinton, he feels the pain of the dead and wounded and their friends and families. But that’s obviously untrue: he couldn’t behave as he does if he suffered a fraction of the grief and hurt of a single dead soldier’s family, or the physical pain of a single amputee, or the psychic pain of a single post-traumatic stress victim, let alone times tens of thousands. They’re suffering and dying for him, and he doesn’t care other than in the narcissistic sense of using their pain to feed his own image of himself as nobly bearing up under the burden of command. Some supporters of the invasion and occupation reap a similar sense of ennoblement from cheering on the needless deaths of others—see the 101^st Keyboard Kommandos—while others are simply enabling the myth to escape responsibility for their own complicity.

Most Americans aren’t sick enough to appropriate the death of a soldier to help ourselves think better of ourselves. By the same token, most Americans obviously don’t take the deaths, injuries and psychological maiming inflicted daily on the troops who are ostensibly dying for us, personally: if more of us did, we’d be hounding the people who conceived and enabled the invasion and apparently endless occupation to end it.

Until that happens, it won’t end. It’s probably too much to ask that Americans take to heart what the occupation has done to Iraqis, but unless we accept what it’s done to us, we’ll be there forever.

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