Turkey Day

(1) The story, and the titular reference, is Cheney dines with troops in Iraq.

(2)The hardcore tacticians may want to sit this one out. A couple of poems came to my mind, and I saw them in the context of the Iraq War. The poems are short; my thoughts follow.

"An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" (Yeats, 1919)

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before...

         *         *         *

"When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer" (Walt Whitman, 1900)

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;	5
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Despite all their fancy reckonings, the astronomers are describing the stars, and to look at them is to apprehend them perhaps even more essentially than would knowing their azimuth, etc. Though I am no tactician, The Learn'd Astronomer brings to mind the learned men in the War Room, who need only step out to see that the situation on the ground in Iraq, by any account, is not bearing the fruit they would hope for.

The Irish Airman is every troop for whom his experience in this theatre will neither improve nor diminish his life, nor the lives of his loved ones.

Wilfred Owen wrote in 1918, before dying on the front line,
that his subject was only one--the pity of war, and further,
"All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poets
must be truthful."  (Whitman had served as a nurse in the
Civil War, and was deeply affected by the horror he'd
witnessed.  Yeats wrote this poem after a friend's son
had been killed in WWI.)

Truth can be found most anywhere--save at a certain
Thanksgiving dinner table in Iraq.

---Lisa