Recognizing Folly

Like so many unnecessary wars, Iraq will end in a whimper. There will be no martial parades and big kisses captured on film in Times Square, just a seeping of troops out of what had been the war zone.

The end is near for the Iraq War, that much seems clear. The irony is that the Iraqis are asking us to leave. George W. Bush is considering when, not if, we should leave.

Iraq begs many questions, mostly the why. Thinking about all the death (American and Iraqi), destruction, cost, and physical and psychological trauma, each American needs to ask larger questions.

Recognizing error, cutting losses, and altering course are not things governments do well. Changing course requires leaders to show considerable self-confidence: Often they are unable to ignore the next election and put their constituencies first.

Most of us who disagreed with the war were marginalized until the fall of 2005. Speaking out was reserved for “peaceniks.”

My son, Marine Lance Corporal Edward “Augie” Schroeder, was killed August 3, 2005, near Haditha, Iraq while deployed with the Third Battalion, 25th Marines, a reserve unit based in Brook Park, Ohio. He was one of 20 Marines from that unit killed within 48 hours. The shock of losing so many troops from one unit in such a short time helped convince “regular” Americans to openly question the validity of the Iraq War.

Cindy Sheehan’s protest in Texas, which she later told us started then because of the sheer magnitude of the Ohio loss, amplified the media noise.

The confluence of these events caused a shift in public opinion and put the onus on the U.S. government to find a way out.

After a good media run focusing on the battle between proponents of “hold the course” and “out now,” the war is now fading from public consciousness as Americans focus on the 2008 presidential election. The death rate has decreased, and people seem to consider the resolution of the conflict to be a done deal.

Even so, American troops continue to be maimed or killed in Iraq. The media largely ignores this part of the war, but the families and friends of the 140,000 or so Americans remaining there -- and those of others about to be deployed -- live each day with anxiety for their loved one’s safety.

Augie’s KIA number was 1,824 if we go alphabetically (he died with 13 comrades in a single explosion). As I write, the number is 4,155.

Some 2,331 deaths ago, Augie told us he didn’t think the efforts in Iraq were worth the cost. Survival for American Marines and soldiers in Iraq was “just a crap shoot,” he said, especially upsetting to the troops in the field because poor execution of the war plan caused their friends to be killed without showing any gain.

Was the Iraq War necessary? With 20/20 hindsight, many Americans believe it was not. It is very sad, then, that additional American lives have been and continue to be lost long after a majority of the American public, the American military, and members of Congress came to that opinion.

In the last three years, my family has given a lot of thought to one question: Why did our son and brother die? We don’t mean the manner of his death, the reasons he joined the Marines, or why and how the USA got involved in Iraq in the first place.

We’re trying to get at the larger Gestalt, the historical, perhaps even the philosophical reasons that prompted his death.

Augie is part of that long line of ghosts whose lives were taken by the folly of governments. Sadly, the lessons of history are seldom heeded. “Passion and party blind our eyes,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.”

Barbara Tuchman, in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. (1984) wondered why governments pursue policies that are clearly not in the best interests of their nation or their people.

She identifies three stages of folly:

First is a standstill, when principles and boundaries governing a political problem are fixed.

Second, failure and criticism begin to appear, which in her words “rigidify” those principles and boundaries.

It is here that changes in policy are possible, but Tuchman calls them “rare as rubies in the backyard.” More typical in this stage are increased investments along with an increasing need to protect egos that make a change in course next to impossible.

In the third stage, the pursuit of failure enlarges the damages until it causes the fall of Troy, the American humiliation in Vietnam, or our current morass in Iraq.

How sad that we haven’t come any further than the Trojans, who let that horse into the gates.

-30-