Murray Polner: If the DC War Hawks Sent Their Own Kids Off to War then Maybe We'd Have Fewer Wars

In Anthony Lewis’s enlightening essay on the Pentagon Papers in the current New York Review of Books, he quotes the former RAND scholar Melvin Gurtov’s description of what the Pentagon Papers were all about.

"The crux of these documents," concludes Gurtov (in John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter, eds., Inside the Pentagon Papers (University Press of Kansas, 2005), "was what they revealed about the duplicity of US leaders, who consistently lied to the American people, the Congress, and the press about many aspects of the war in the Kennedy and Johnson years. Presidents and their national security advisors knew the war was being lost…." Might historians someday reach the same conclusion about the Cheney-Bush decision to invade Iraq and expand Pax Americana throughout the world when their papers and the archives are finally released to the public?

Finally, if yet another nation is to be invaded in the name of "democracy" and "freedom" then reluctant and uninspired conscripts may have to replace the Iraq war’s depleted and exhausted volunteers, swelling the casualty lists once again. None of this seems to trouble Washington’s bellicose party itching to dominate the Persian Gulf and Central Asia. A draft, imperial dreams and war always go hand in hand.

Prowar imperialists such as Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling changed their minds once their sons were killed in World War I. Grieving, TR went to an early grave. Kipling could only assuage his grief and guilt by penning his shattering couplet:

If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.