Byron Norwood’s Mother
I felt so sorry for Byron Norwood’s mother at the State of the Union speech tonight. She forever has lost her son in a war of lies; a war now unpopular with the majority of Americans. The best (and closest) symbolic reason she could find for her son’s ultimate sacrifice was embodied in the Iraqi woman who stood one row below her in the audience.
Two women caught up in a liar’s web, they embraced. The Iraqi woman seemed truly grateful to the U.S. for bringing a war for democracy to her country. Completing the liar’s web, the dead Marine’s dog tags became entangled in the democracy-seeking woman’s dress-jacket as the women continued to hug. For a brief moment, they were as one.
GOP cheerleaders showed appreciation almost wildly, perhaps a bit too long and loud for Byron Norwood’s mother’s comfort.
President Bush had prefaced the introduction of Byron Norwood’s parents by saying that Byron “died for our freedom”.
But he didn’t. Byron Norwood died for a nation inside which his Commander in Chief told him were dangerous weapons of mass destruction. The weapons, Byron’s Commander in Chief told him, were imminently threatening U.S. national security and the lives of Byron’s countrymen. The prospect of a mushroom cloud was lurking. That, we now know for certain, was untrue, and seems to have been no more than a ruse to turn Iraq into President Bush’s testing ground for him to become some kind of ‘Freedom-Messiah’ for posterity’s sake, all at great risk to the lives of U.S. troops.
“Bring ‘em on,” he’d said. As one might expect, when invited and dared, insurgents ‘brought ‘em on’. What was once a land run by a internationally-contained tin-pot dictator has become a haven for something far more insidiously destructive to the safety of the Iraqi people and the preservation of their culture.
Iraq is now a magnet for terrorists. Iraq is in shamble, traces of their cultural history destroyed. Before the pre-emptive war, there was no provable connection whatsoever between Iraq’s government and the 9/11 terrorists, even though we were lied to, time and time again, about it. [Speaking of 9/11, remember how many times you heard it invoked during the Republican convention? How many times did you hear it tonight?]
He was a brave and loyal soldier, but Byron Norwood didn’t die for ‘our freedom’. We’ve been a free nation for centuries now, and the only threat to our freedom these days seems to come from within.
Let’s be honest. Byron died for Iraq’s freedom, a freedom that has not arrived yet. Elections do not equate to democracy. It’s going to be a long haul for the Iraqis, and it’s not the U.S. military’s responsibility to unilaterally fight a never-ending and violent battle for a foreign government when there is no threat to our own national security. I’ll wager that Byron didn’t even understand wht he was actually fighting (and dying) for. If there was one salvation for Mrs. Norwood, I’d imagine it was the day the elections went off with less than 50 Iraqis being blown to bits. It gave her what she could grab onto as a noble reason for her son’s sacrifice.
How many more U.S. soldiers will die for a foreign government in a war they never should have been sent to initiate in the first place? Millions of Americans are gullible. We know that, after seeing their acceptance of being lied to (so boldly) by their own government and forgetting so easily, with the tried-and-true recipe of a few repeated lines in a political speech, an emotional scene set up for political effect, and a few ounces of all-too-positive media coverage.
If we say we’ll be leaving when democracy takes hold in Iraq, that might mean “never”. It’s time for an exit strategy to be made clear to the American public.
I don’t want to have to see another American soldier’s mother hugging another woman from some other foreign land whose sovereignty we had no business meddling in next year, or the year after that. President Bush’s overt threats to Syria and Iran tonight gave me no comfort or trust in his future judgements
