Why we fight

Emily Miller, whose brother serves in the Army National Guard, and is about to be posted to Iraq, writes about their thoughts in the Washington Post.

I strongly encourage you to read this thoughtful article in full, but an excerpt that particularly caught my eye:

What I find offensive is the idea that we have to "follow through" in order to give their deaths meaning post hoc. It is dreadfully apparent from the Iraq Study Group report that Iraq isn't going to have a democracy in any meaningful time frame. Even if this administration does everything perfectly, the best-case scenario is that we might maintain the barest outlines of order.

Victory being out of the question at this point, the only democracy my brother is fighting for in Iraq is our democracy. The only constitution he is in Iraq fighting to defend is our Constitution>. If my brother dies, it will not be for a mistake but rather because of his deeply held belief that the time it takes us as a people to figure out through democratic processes that we are wrong is more important than his own life.

This places upon us an obligation. My brother and other service members living and dead have given us the sacred responsibility to use the democratic means we have at hand to bring judgment to bear on whether any given war is worth our soldiers' lives. [Emphasis mine-CK]

How much wiser is this soldier than those (cf. Gingrich, Newt and Goode, Virgil) who would abandon the constitution in search of political gain.