Anchorage Daily News

Saturday, May 9, was the first warm day of a chilly spring in Soldotna. Traffic buzzed on the Sterling Highway that bisects the town as people hurried to garage sales, took winter trash to the dump and got ready for gardening. Up at the high school a soccer game was going on and folks from Anchorage were passing through on their way to the Homer Shore Bird Festival.

Virtually unnoticed, a handful of people gathered in a downtown park to observe the "Eyes Wide Open" installation commemorating Alaska's Iraq war dead. Pairs of boots with name tags were arranged in neat rows on the lawn; a respectful, if temporary, Flanders Field honoring those who paid the ultimate price of war. In a separate area, men's, women's and children's shoes were similarly arranged symbolizing Iraqi civilian dead.

There were no speeches. The simple ceremony consisted of reading the names of the dead Alaskans and those who had been stationed in Alaska and a like number of dead Iraqis while the 20 or so who chose to give up a warm spring morning to think about the consequences of war listened quietly with aching hearts. Just to the east, the sibilant Kenai River provided a natural dirge for the solemn scene. But the river music was overwhelmed by the cacophony of nearby traffic as the highway sang a song of normalcy proclaiming the actual sentiment of the public's perception of the Iraq War today -- nobody wants to think about it anymore.

Five years ago the scene in Soldotna, like just about everywhere in the United States, was quite different. Fresh from regime change of Afghanistan's bin Laden-friendly Taliban, it seemed like every other car along the Sterling Highway sported a flag of war, and unbridled patriotism fueled support for the coming attack on Iraq, justified, the Bush administration told us, for its weapons of mass destruction program and implied involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The evening of 9/11 I sat at home listening to the radio. By that time it was late at night in most parts of the United States and the country was still trying to come to grips with the attack. Correspondents interviewed everyday people about their feelings, and disbelief and confusion were turning to rage. When asked what we should do, a common opinion was "bomb them" even though at that point it wasn't clear who "they" were. All except for one person. When asked about her reaction to the 9/11 attacks, a woman emerging from a candlelight memorial service at a church in Houston, Texas, said, "We should forgive them."

If our capacity for forgiveness exceeded our desire for revenge we would be living in a much different world now. Immediately after 9/11 we had the moral high ground. Virtually everyone, including Arab countries (excepting Afghanistan's Taliban) expressed sympathy for the inhumane attack. Around the world for a brief moment of history we were seen as a gentle giant wronged by a handful of madmen.

But forgiveness is not in our national lexicon and we didn't take the moral high ground. Instead the Bush White House used news propaganda to transform a demand for vengeance into fear. Because of fear we readily accepted the assertion that Iraq was making weapons of mass destruction and, in concert with al-Qaida, was surely going to use them. Both were lies intended to mask the real reasons for war -- control of oil and oil markets.

Now after a trillion dollars, a million dead Iraqis, 4 million orphans, 4,000 dead American soldiers and another generation of veterans who will spend the rest of their lives battling post-traumatic stress disorder and hobbling to the post office on ill-fitting prosthetics to collect paltry disability checks, we are embarrassed because we were so easily influenced by scripted news that we didn't ask the hard question required of participants in democracy: Exactly why is this war necessary? And so it is easier to look away from the boots on the ground and go about our daily business because they are a haunting reminder that we failed those young soldiers and their families by uncritically embracing the rhetoric of terror, thereby sanctioning an ill-advised, unwinnable war for which they nobly gave their lives.

Alan Boraas is a professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College.

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