A rationale for Iraq war is demanded

With the number of U.S. infantry deaths in Iraq rapidly approaching 2,000, it could at some point become easier to let the numbers speak in place of the names, faces and identities of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice.
It could, but that would be a very tragic turn of events.

Those old enough to recall the Vietnam War, which television cameras brought into our living rooms nightly, will remember the routine of newscasts closing with reports of 117 or 92 or 176 additional U.S. soldiers killed in combat during that day's news cycle.

Reaching back to World War II, World War I or the Civil War, there was no such immediacy to the body count reports. Battles were then measured by the tens of thousands of lives lost.

In this respect, considerable gratitude is owed to Cindy Sheehan and the more than 100 people who have now joined her makeshift campsite outside of President Bush's Texas ranch to protest the loved ones lost in the fighting in Iraq. They remind us of the names behind the numbers. So does our own Rebecca Helmes in a front-page commentary in today's Palladium-Item.

War, it has been correctly said, is hell. To presume that the level of carnage provides the accurate measure for war's moral rationale is wrong. A divided nation would surely, and wrongly, have accommodated a compromise on the question of slavery if carnage alone was the moral measure for war. How much of the world would be living under 20th-century fascism?

Still, it is vitally important that the deaths of these brave young U.S. servicemen and women not be in vain, that they not become just so many numbers. It is important because a nation in general and the families and loved ones in particular are owed more. They are owed a clearly articulated rationale for the continued sacrifices being made.

They are owed the connection to how those sacrifices advance the cause of liberty and interests this nation holds dear.

That remains both the opportunity and the necessity for this nation's political leadership.

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