May 26, 2003 - On Sunday of the long Memorial Day weekend Team Penske won the Indianapolis 500. An American soldier died in what was called an accidental explosion at a storage site for captured Iraqi munitions located outside of Baghdad. On Monday, Memorial Day while President Bush was making the annual visit to the Unknowns at Arlington one American Soldier died in an ambush 100 miles north of the Iraqi capitol and another died when the Humvee in which he and his team mates were patrolling struck an homemade land mine on the Baghdad Airport road. With these three added to the official count published on Saturday the dead from the Second Iraqi War now number 199.

The old men of the Bush Administration sent our youngsters to Iraq because, they said, Saddam Hussein could not be trusted to possess chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. They had to go because Hussein had amassed a secret arsenal of mass destruction and the will to use them. They had to go because Saddam was in league with Al Qaida terrorists to whom he had or would or might give these awesome weapons. America’s very survival was at stake and that justified the resort to a preemptive war, Today the allied dead of the Second Iraqi War can join in the sentiments of the WWI dead of whom Kipling wrote in 1918 saying, “If any question why we died, tell them because our fathers lied."

No one, except the most blindly obedient, believes in the pre-war justifications promulgated by the Bush Administration. Only the blindest of fools can truly believe that the fearsome weapons described repeatedly in the run up to combat were so effectively hidden that they could not be detected and captured by the very Army sent to seize them. Only the most loyal of the true-believers still have faith that the deposed Iraqi regime ever had the capacity to threaten its nearest neighbors, let alone the United States. The bogey-man had evaporated in the clear light of dawn. We need no longer start at shadows. 199 youngsters have died because the old men in Washington lied.

Lies come back to haunt the statesmen who resort to falsehoods as a technique of leadership. Kipling wrote of them too, in The Dead Statesman in 1924. “I could not dig, I dare not rob, Therefore I lied to please the mob. Now all my lies are proved untrue and I must face the men I slew. What tale shall serve me here among mine young and defrauded young.”

199 British and American soldiers did not die in Iraq to bring freedom to America and Britain. They died to mask the loss of that treasured liberty in the name of security. They died, as too many have died and left only their names inscribed on marble walls, because their Statesmen lied. Those who spoke those lies will have to face them for eternity.