SEPTEMBER SONG

“Oh, it’s a long, long time, from May to December
But the days grow short, when you reach September."

Those words from the Kurt Weill pop standard of 1938 are meant to evoke an appreciation of the long arc of life sharing one’s final days with a great love.

But the words evoke a more tragic and sinister meaning in the May to September surge of our depleted military in the made up war in Iraq. They signify that approximately 360 deceived and doomed soldiers will die during this time at the current rate of three per day simply because the administration refuses to admit they were wrong. Having lied us into this war, they ignore the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group to begin military disengagement and seek political solutions to the catastrophe they unleashed in Iraq.

Instead the administration did precisely the opposite, escalating the war by flooding Iraq with 30,000 more targets for the frustrated Iraqis to shoot at and blow up with their thousands of bombs, human or otherwise.

These poor soldiers will not get to appreciate the September of their years because they are trapped in the utterly phony plea of the war party to wait from May till September for a progress report which will never materialize. We have been getting pleas like this from the administration throughout the fifty-one months of this unnecessary military enterprise that has failed.

We need to bring these fine solders home now to live out the type of full life envisioned in September Song.

As for the war-first crowd which is headed for the scrap heap of history? Their lives can be summed up in the 1963 Bob Dylan song “Masters of War”

“You that never done nothing
But build to destroy
You that play with my world
Like it’s your little toy

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
While the death count gets higher"

Originally published in Glen Ellyn Sun, July 6, 2007