SHIT HAPPENS

And so now, even the Americans who have died in Iraq are a taboo subject, if not approached with careful politically correct patriotic fervor. To bring them up in a negative tone, rather than as a toast to the war effort, is in fact to aid the enemy. Seventeen hundred American lives is suddenly something we should regard, if not with accolades, then with casual acknowledgement. We living Americans are overly squeamish about American wartime deaths, we are told by the manlier among us, for they are trivial when compared to the glory of the U.S. nation-state itself. Now that the main selling point of the war as an act to protect American lives has been completely demolished, the continued sacrifice of American lives by the government is still defended, but on more tenuous grounds: people die in war, and this war to dispose of the brutally murderous Saddam and establish democracy in Iraq will certainly be proved to have been worth it.