In the midst of the war in Vietnam, a time when I wrote a daily column for the Minneapolis Star, I sometimes telephoned the family of a Minnesota man killed in the fighting. Three or four times I attended the funeral service or the rites in the cemetery.

The survivors answered my questions with whatever courtesy they could summon from the depth of their desolation. I wrote of their anguish but also their pride. Where it seemed right, I tried to reconstruct the young man’s life, to explore his fears and whimsies and his visions of a world without the daily scent of death. I quoted from his letters reluctantly, because each time I turned a page it seemed a clumsy invasion. And yet the family said “we’d like to share these.” It was their way of telling the world of their unbreakable commitment to him and their love. They seemed to be saying: he was a fine young man who had so much to give; we treasured him then and we treasure him now. But he was so young.

I grieved with the family as the flag-covered coffin was lowered. The soldier who’d lost his life had been drafted to fight, or he’d volunteered. It didn’t seem important at the cemetery how he acquired the uniform. At the requiems, I thought of what we’d shared. We had grown up in a part of America we both knew well and whose ideas of social fairness seemed to make sense. We had worn the same uniform. We were somehow together.

It never occurred to me that in order to grieve for the victims of war I had to agree with the purposes of the war or why and how it was waged.

I thought it was highly unlikely that all of its victims had. It never occurred to me that in order to be counted an honorable citizen of the country, one had to give robotic support to the behavior of the government waging the war.

But today we have Iraq. We have a presidential election. We’ve been handed new rules about what constitutes star-spangled, dipped-in-apple-sauce patriotism. It means let Karl Rove and Fox News decide how loyal you are to America. It means buy Donald Rumsfeld’s baloney. It means you can’t claim to support the American troops in Iraq unless you keep George Bush in the White House.

This is what’s being piped into the political commercials.

It didn’t occur to me that there was any contradiction between being (a) an American citizen infuriated by being systematically lied to and manipulated by the government on the life-and-death issues of war, and (b) being an American citizen who could still mourn the death of young American soldiers in Iraq.

In the marketing of the war in Iraq, and in the high-stakes sound bites of a presidential election, there is a rising and disgusting innuendo: if you don’t like how we got into Iraq and why, you have to be privately cheering those mounting body counts.

That’s the equation. You’re giving aid and comfort to terrorists if you harbor a suspicion that the government may actually have something to hide by trying to tar Richard Clarke and the rest of the talking insiders who seem to have the goods.

The war was sold as an indispensable step to eradicate terror. What it has done is to expand the terror. But the newest strategy of its promoters is to paint you as a moral outcast, a jellied wimp, if you wonder out loud about the spreading bloodshed and shambles in Iraq and raise questions about who drew this aimless blueprint and where is it taking us.

Under the new rules of patriotism and fearless Americanism, talking that way means you want us to cut and run in Iraq.

That’s the picture the marketers of the war are trying to create to salvage the election. That is the new definition of what you’re doing if you say you don’t trust the people who are running the government as though it’s a private inner sanctum guarded by wolfhounds and Dick Cheney’s contractors.

There is no middle ground there. If you think there might have been a better way in Iraq, a way to avoid getting 500 more Americans killed after George Bush landed unopposed on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier, you’re saying we ought to cut and run.

If you think there had to be a better way to obliterate and occupy Iraq, without theatrically humiliating the United Nations before it happened, then you’re saying we ought to cut and run. In today’s Washington, those are the new rules of engagement if you want to win your stripes as a patriotic citizen.

If you believe there might have been a way to avoid killing thousands of Iraqi innocents, then you’re saying to the arbiters of patriotism: it wasn’t worth the slaughter; they were human beings, too. The answer from the White House comes with a thunderclap of indictment: you’re a bleating heart, a whipped dog and probably a subversive.

If you express contempt for the evasions, duplicity and secrecy that constitute the modus operandi of today’s government in Washington, then you’re saying we ought to bug out of Iraq.

In fact, you’re saying no such thing. In fact, not many people are. Even if you wanted to, it’s a delusion that the USA can cut and run. We’re embedded there. We’re embedded because we put out a contract to change the regime, to oversee the distribution of Iraq’s oil, to eventually reshape the Middle East, and to elect George in November.

That is the scenario. We can dispose of the argument about the real purposes of the war in Iraq. That’s not going to be unraveled in time for November of 2004 let alone November of 3004. It felt reassuring to go to war at a time when we were 45 minutes away from mass destruction. It turns out there had to be other reasons.

What those reasons were is interesting but not compelling at this point. What matters now is to put enough soldiers and airmen and marines into Iraq long enough to establish some law and order, to separate the maniacal insurgents from the sane insurgents, to stop the killing and to wait for November. There’s only one fundamental question the American people need to answer then: Who do you trust most to level with you about what the government is doing with your lives and your children’s future?

If the answer is the incumbent president, then the country should not complain about where it’s going, or, in fact, where it’s been.

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar