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| U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2007 (public domain) |
Boston Globe columnist James Carroll examines U.S. history in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and even the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac in his moving comments on a recent speech by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:
Carroll writes:
IN ADDRESSING the cadet corps at West Point last month, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates unknowingly plucked the mystic chords of the Abraham-Isaac story in Genesis. A father is prepared to sacrifice his beloved son, but at the last moment his knife-wielding hand is stayed by a God who desires no such offering. Gates is Abraham, the cadets are Isaac, but the staying voice now is not God’s, but history’s.
One pictures the dressed lines of gray tunics, bright young faces lifted to the white-haired Gates with utter trust. The secretary did not invoke the story of the nearly slain son, of course, but neither did he flinch from the gravity of his role. “I feel personally responsible for each and every one of you,’’ he solemnly told the cadets, “as if you were my own sons and daughters.’’
The speech was extraordinary, also, for its frank acknowledgment that America’s elders have consistently failed the nation’s sons and daughters in sending them off to war. “Since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right — from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more.’’ Gates was faulting failures to anticipate the true nature of those engagements, but their outcomes arguably establish that all of them were unjustified. Young lives wasted.
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