The real costs of war.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Veterans Day - Comment - Editorial

Veterans are on the leading edge of U.S. policy. They absorb the shock--for all Americans--of our choices about getting into wars. They have to confront and deal with how our nation chooses to live in the world in a very deep and personal way.

The late, great Howard Zinn, a World War II vet who was a columnist for The Progressive, wrote about Veterans Day, "I do not want the recognition of my service to be used as a glorification of war."

He decried the fact that Veterans Day, "instead of an occasion for denouncing war, has been turned into an occasion for bringing out the flags, the uniforms, the martial music, the patriotic speeches reeking with hypocrisy."

November 11, formerly known as Armistice Day, is the anniversary of the end of the War to End All Wars.

World War I was then the bloodiest war in history--it left thirty-five million dead and disabled, mowed down by machine guns, gassed, their bodies strewn in no-man's land.

In the aftermath, there was a widespread belief in this country that we had to move away from war and toward peace.

Out of that came the U.S. leadership in the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which prohibited the use of war as "an instrument of national policy" except in matters of self-defense.

The promise of that moment faded quickly. War is still an instrument of national policy.

In World War I, between 60 percent and 80 percent of casualties were uniformed military. In Iraq and other modern wars, 90 percent of casualties are civilians.

Disastrous violence throughout the Middle East has generated a wave of desperate refugees fleeing to Europe. Civilians are bearing the brunt of war, injustice, and instability. This is the new face of war--of shock and awe, and the military muscle behind economic shock doctrine--that we confront today.

In his book about the history of the Iraq War, Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq, British journalist Nicolas Davies reviews the sordid history of U.S. involvement in Iraq, starting with the lies that got us there.

American politicians, the media, and the public have developed a protective amnesia that helps us forget just how outrageous some of our government's actions are.

You may remember that our government spent a lot of time both confirming and denying that the Iraq War had anything to do with oil.

Alan Greenspan called the Iraq War "essential" to secure world oil supplies, adding in his memoir, "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to...